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Title: A travesty
Review: This film version of a tender, graceful book mistakes bathos for pathos and calendar art for cinema. It was made as an ornament to Toho Film Co.'s 50th anniversary and, like some events with a big build-up, is a chilling anticlimax. The star-studded cast are not capable of resembling a family of any sort, and certainly not the Makioka family, as Tanizaki wrote them. His book needed a classy scenario - what it gets here is pedestrian dialogue delivered in formulaic performances. Director Kon Ichikawa's camera does not know where it wants to be in many of the interior scenes. It tries every angle on for size. Nothing can come to life, cinematically, under this aimlessness. The art direction - the story is set in 1930s Japan - is perfectly evocative of 1983, when the film was made. It is also evocative of what many recognise to be a sterile period in Japanese cinema.
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