Nogiku no gotoki kimi nariki (1955)

User Rating:

7.6/10   

Director:

Keisuke Kinoshita

Writers:

Sachio Ito (novel)
Keisuke Kinoshita (script)

Release Date:

21 January 1960 (USA)

Genre:

Drama | Romance

Plot:

An old man, being rowed along a river, sees a field of daisies (or Wild Chrysanthemums, as they are described in the title...

Plot Keywords:

Tragedy | Based On Novel

Awards:

2 wins

Cast

Noriko Arita	...	Tamiko
Chishu Ryu	...	Masao - Age 73
Haruko Sugimura	...	Masao's mother
Takahiro Tamura
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Toshio Kobayashi
Kappei Matsumoto
Kazuko Motohashi	...	Tamiko's mother
Nobuo Takagi	...	Tamiko's father
Shinji Tanaka	...	Masao, as a teenager
Kumeko Urabe	...	Grandmother

Also Known As:

My First Love Affair (Australia)
She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum

Runtime:

USA:100 min | Australia:92 min

Country:

Japan

Language:

Japanese

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Company:

Shochiku Kinema Kenkyû-jo

Movie Connections:

Version of Nogiku no haka (1981)

Sentimental recollection of adolescence

The style of this film manages to be at once naturalistic, sentimental, and at times highly dramatic. The minutiae of daily life in a village makes the settings very real indeed. Harvesting and threshing rice, picking "egg-apples" and cotton in the mountains, gossiping over dinner.

The boy and girl, whose childhood innocence but very strong friendship seamlessly turns into more adult love (though thoroughly chaste), are mercilessly taunted by nearly everyone close to them. The impression is of a relationship developing under total and minute scrutiny. This sort of thing can happen anywhere, particularly in a small village, but in a Japanese village, the atmosphere for the young couple is beyond claustrophobic, even when they are in the wide open spaces.

The tone of the story is, and is enhanced by the generally restrained performances, highly emotional, sometimes veering towards melodrama. Though I would be hard pressed to describe this story as a romance, I can well imagine some viewers being moved to tears by the unfairness and injustice of it all.

The story was rather too simple for my liking, though this could be unfair, because I am comparing it to masterworks by the same director, such as Happiness For Us Alone. Nevertheless, the story becomes powerful and effecting towards the end, and is difficult to forget.