the audience applauded

Strong and Moving!

How sad is this?

Fresh and Exciting

I will first declare myself a fan of the book. As an adaptation this film is something of a hack job, and taken on its own merits borders on melodrama. The novel has been described as photo-realist and so the affected acting and melodramatic additions of the script are particularly jarring. Further, the sneering, satirical tone that hangs above many scenes implies actual disrespect of the source material. There is almost complete disregard for the characters of the novel, apart from their most basic profiles. The women are rendered feminine stereotypes via almost constant tears (totally absent from the novel), and the men tend to just shout and lust. For some reason the characters are always at each others throats. The portrayal of Yukiko is particularly shallow, and the most bizarre addition of the script is a salacious and thankfully slightly executed romance subplot between Yukiko and Teinnosuke, which seems to serve only to give male audience a sexual object. On the positive side all the technical aspects blah blah

The Makioka Sisters shows Ichikawa going back to one of the greatest 20th Century Japanese writers, Junichiro Tanizaki. Ichikawa had already directed, in the 1950s, a stunning adaptation of the Tanizaki novel The Key. The Key is an elliptical comedy about erotic fixation, with a lush visual style of saturated colors. The Makioka Sisters is a more subtle and delicate film, attuned as the novel was to the undercurrents running through the highly structured lives of the main characters. In some ways, the novel was Tanizaki's attempt to write a modern version of Murasaki Shikibu's Tale of Genji, and Ichikawa seems to have understood this in his adaptation, which brings a great deal of low-key humor and psychological insight to the proceedings, all very much in the Genji style. Essential viewing.

I give this film 10 out of 10 as even after seeing it more than 10 times it still moves me deeply. I was 15 years old when I first saw this movie in the theater in Seattle. I went back to see it again a couple of weeks later. The first 13 minutes during the credits is my favorite scene, filmed in Kyoto in Springtime. Read the book for more background. The Kimono worn by the female actresses are amazing. The late Juzo Itami plays the father. All the dialog is spoken in "Osaka-ben" or Osaka dialect, which has a softer sound than Tokyo dialect. You can also hear some Kyoto-ben too ("gomen-yasu" said by a servant upon entering in the first scene before entering the room). This film brings me to tears it is so beautiful. At the end of the first scene, when the camera pans out to the cherry blossoms outside and the music starts...it is cinematic heaven! I am waiting for this film to come out on DVD.

One should first read The Makioka Sisters by Junichiro Tanizaki to better understand this film. It is a very great novel about the life of four middle-class sisters in Osaka, Japan in the 1930's. The book describes in great detail the many subtleties of life in Japan which a Westerner can miss understanding in the film. The film rather closely follows the book and is very beautifully photographed.