Shunkinsho: Okoto to Sasuke (Shimazu, 1935): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 6.10pm
This 35mm presentation, also being screened on September 5th, is part of the Kinuyo Tanaka season at BFI Southbank. Full details here.
Film at Lincoln Center review:
Among Tanaka’s personal favorites, the first of many adaptations of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s classic novel A Portrait of Shunkin casts
the 25-year-old actress as a blind music teacher, Okoto, living
affluently in Osaka during the Meiji era. She rejects nearly every male
suitor, but her servant Sasuke (Kōkichi Takada), who escorts her to
lessons, takes his growing adoration for her to bizarre lengths.
Employing a sharply confined, period-specific space and a sync
soundtrack of koto-shamisen music, Shimazu transforms the source text’s
masochistic romance into something more like a chaste melodrama, while
Tanaka’s magnetic, astonishingly modern performance instigates the
film’s palpably tense climax.
Here (and above) is an extract.
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