Three Loves

Unlike many Japanese directors, who boasted well over 50 films under their belt, Kobayashi Masaki's 30 year career as a director produced a modest 21 fiction films. Of course quality out-weights quantity, and many of Kobayashi's films are among best Japanese films ever made. Yet, because there are "so few", you feel extra sad for the ones, that don't really live up to his standards. Kobayashi first made a personal film in 1953 with "Kabe atsuki heya" (The Thick-Walled Room), but the studio did not like and shelved it for three years. This made the director return to the Kinoshita flavor of his first two films, with some Shimizu-esque touches added here and there.

"Mittsu no ai" (Three Loves, 1953) is the weakest film in Kobayashi's filmography. His early efforts may be a little dull and lack his later societal angst, but they are not badly made films. He was a pro. But "Mittsu no ai" fails flat in everything it tries. The general idea is to depict a small rural community in the post-war years, and through the local characters, paint a portrait of three different kinds of love. This already is an arguable failing, since I counted five different kinds of love: love between mother and a child, love between man and woman, love between friends, love of God, and love of animals. Love of art could be the sixth, and I'm sure you could find more.

The film does not have one narrative, but instead introduces various characters and tells their stories. If there is one central character, that would be Heita, a mentally challenged boy, who loves running in the hills, and has an obsession about birds. The element of the film that gets most time is Heita's running, his birds, his friendship with another boy Ikujiro, and his weird relationship with a Christian priest (Ito Yunosuke). The priest struggles with his love of God, and also the love for his ex-wife. Yunosuke misses his mother, from whom he gets separated in the very beginning. There is also a poor painter, who is in love with the beautiful teacher, played by Kishi Keiko, and some other characters too, like the mother played by Yamada Isuzu.

The narrative threads do not really form a neat tapestry here, and they aren't that interesting either. To make his film comprehensible in at least some way, Kobayashi has added narration to the beginning and to the end. This frames the film as a Christian tale of moral, though the depiction of Christianity in this film is loose and thoroughly weird. Especially the religious portrayal of Heita's insanity is not well thought out.

I love Kobayashi's films, and I am also very fond of Shimizu Hiroshi's childhood depictions and Kinoshita Keisuke's young romances, both of which this film emulates. But "Three Loves" is chaotic from start to finish. The film lacks meaning or substance, and though it tries to depict different kinds of love, it does not have anything new to say about them. Two hours becomes a long time to spend running on the hills with Christians chasing birds.

I will say this for Masaki Kobayashi, there is a lot of ambition in his second feature film as both writer and director (The Thick-Walled Room was filmed first but delayed four years by the Japanese insistence on not revisiting the darker portions of their involvement in the Second World War). He wanted to tell a story of the three types of love (the Greek words agape, philia, and storge aren't ever explicit, but they're pretty obviously the three words most likely applying, though there's also space for eros), and he created a fairly large cast of characters to do it with. Similarly to Youth of the Son, I feel like more time could have been spent with the story to flesh it out a bit more, but also like Sincerity, I feel like there's a wonderfully deep well of genuine emotion that Kobayashi was drawing from. Working firmly in the melodramatic conventions prevalent during the day, the slightly overburdened story ends up getting a bit too weepy, but otherwise there's a wonderful and surprisingly complex approach to dramatizing the concept at a narrative level.

Ikujiro (Ichiro Hosoya) is a young boy of about ten brought to a remote mountain village because his mother cannot afford to feed him anymore. She leaves him in the hands of a welfare administrator who owns some kind of bottling facility. Along the way to town, they encounter Heita (Shoji Mori), a developmentally disabled boy of the same age who is obsessed with animals and nature (his first line is, "Me butterfly"). His father is a lecturer contemplating a move to Tokyo while his mother is a housewife who dotes on her simple son. At the same time, a young, female, music teacher named Michiko (Keiko Kishi) has moved to the village for her health while her boyfriend Nishida (Ko Mishima) has stayed behind in the city, insisting on breaking up their relationship because he can't provide well enough for her while also knowing that her desire is to make him happy by providing for him so he can spend his time painting. In the middle of this is the Catholic priest Father Yasugi (Yunosuke Ito) who became a priest ten years prior when his wife left him for a younger man.

There's a lot of relationships going around in here, and it's a good amount to take in. The film often feels like it's going to fly apart with so much, but they are all centered around the central idea of the compromises and challenges of love. There are several parent-child bonds. There are several husband-wife bonds. There are even some friendship bonds that develop, mostly between the young Ikujiro and Heita. None of them are easy. Heita tries to steal Ikujiro's flute (given to him by his dead father), and the two fight, but they end up bonding over Heita's love of animals. Heita's mother struggles with her son's mental state, finding him a loving boy but simple to the point where it's obvious she worries about his future. Heita's father has no idea what to do with his slow-witted son and gravitates towards his students instead. Michiko, alone in this small village, finds solace in being a vessel for Heita to open up to, especially after they meet in the church where he hides to see the pigeons that don't move, decorations on the side of the nave, and this is our introduction to Father Yasugi.

The film takes its time becoming an interesting look at how one operates in a world of pain and loss against the promises of the Christian God. Bad things happen to good people, but they're mostly driven by personal decisions like Yasugi's wife choosing to leave him or Yasugi refuses to let go of his anger towards her. Love is hard, and all of these stories revolve around it. Loving a disabled child is hard. Doing what's best for your child when you can't feed him is hard. Pursuing your artistic dreams while also trying to find a way to make your sickly spouse happy is hard.

What keeps the film from flying apart at the seams is the fact that all of the stories revolve around this central idea, and all of the stories are well-written enough to stand largely on their own. They're almost like four or five shorter films interwoven together to make something larger, but they interact way too much directly for them to be simply separate short films (Father Yasugi is an old friend of Heita's father, and they have two important scenes together, for instance). From a technical perspective, they're well-filmed and well-performed, and there's real emotion there. I think my favorite of the four or five stories is Father Yasugi's. The pain he faces trying to rectify his anger with his duty as a priest to forgive when he receives word that his ex-wife is dying is palpable.

The film ends in purely melodramatic fashion, and I don't get the point unless it's to meet a convention. There's a death, a tragic death, and it leads to much crying from our characters. The death was the lynchpin to just about everyone's story, so I get the connection, but the death ends up feeling a bit empty, not really meaning much and a bit manipulative.

Still, there's real ambition to this film. Kobayashi, probably reeling a bit from his inability to actually release his first film that could be called fully his own, returned to the genre that he had been working in, and he swung for the fences. The end result is an ambitious, somewhat affecting, and nearly unwieldy ensemble piece that centers around a clear core idea. I think Kobayashi was proving early in his career that he not only had great technical skill, but that he also has a sense of cinematic ambition that was going to pay off in spades later in his career. In this earlier, rougher form, there's still a good bit to take in and enjoy, imperfect though the experience may be.