Los Angeles Times
Minnesota Reader

`Bride' Weds Disappointment With Love

by Kevin Thomas
Los Angeles Times
May 5, 1995. pg. 8

Between 1907 and 1924 more than 19,000 Japanese women immigrated to Hawaii to marry Japanese sugar-cane workers. These couples knew little of each other beyond an exchange of photos. Drawing upon the actual experiences of many such women, some of them still living in their 90s, director Kayo Hatta and her sister and co-writer Mari have created the exquisite "Picture Bride," a gentle and eloquent tale of perseverance that blossoms finally into the most tender of love stories.

Diminutive Youki Kudoh, who was one-half of the funny punk couple in Jim Jarmusch's "Mystery Train," plays a traditional Japanese girl, the 16-year-old Riyo. Arriving in Hawaii in 1918 full of apprehension, she quickly decides she's made a terrible mistake. Her soon-to-be-husband Matsuji (Akira Takayama) proves to be 43, a good 20 years older than the photo of himself he sent her.

A virile man of the soil, he attempts to take her roughly on their wedding night in his modest cottage. He repels Riyo, who rejects his clumsy advances, to the extent that she becomes determined to save up her earnings to pay for her way back to Japan. We know very well that with a pay rate of 65 cents a day, minus expenses, that she is as unlikely to attain this goal as she is to give it up, so badly does she need it to sustain her in her first rugged months in the cane fields.

Once Riyo has taken considerable ribbing for being a "city girl"-she's from Yokohama-she begins to gather strength from the earthy camaraderie of the other women, forging a friendship with the beautiful but disillusioned Kana (Tamlyn Tomita), whose handsome husband Kanzaki (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) has degenerated into a drunken wife-beater.

Kanzaki has given in to the bitterness and frustration of a particularly vicious and racist cycle: The fieldworkers are supervised by a lethally brutal Portuguese, who in turn can never rise above his own station because of Anglo discrimination. Meantime, he refuses to pay Filipino workers as much as the Japanese. In short, Hatta reminds us that the racial harmony so vaunted in today's Hawaii was not so long ago far from the norm. (Shortened considerably from its showing at Cannes last year, "Picture Bride" curiously tells of a brewing strike only to pull away from it completely.)

Hatta and her collaborators, however, bring to Riyo's odyssey an epic vision in which the natural and the supernatural blend effortlessly, as they so often do in Japanese films. "Picture Bride" unfolds as a series of ravishingly beautiful, highly sensual images, captured by "Like Water for Chocolate" cinematographer Claudio Rocha and accompanied by Mark Adler's shimmering score, which incorporates motifs from both Japanese and Hawaiian music.

It's the scope and depth of Hatta's vision, combined with its intense particularity of time and place, that gives Riyo's story such universality; "Picture Bride" couldn't be more Japanese-or more American. Hatta's perspective, furthermore, allows her to be fair-minded to the disappointed, well-meaning Matsuji, even to the hateful Portuguese. The film glows with a feminine sensibility-a sensibility that reveals that strength and delicacy can go hand in hand.

Hatta is not only a visionary but also a fine director of actors. Who could have guessed at the depths Kudoh is capable of from her off-the-wall character in "Mystery Train"? Like Kudoh, Takayama shows us an individual in the process of growing, changing, adapting. Tomita makes the kind of impression you hope will be indelible with the award-givers. And Tagawa, although on screen only briefly, conveys Kanzaki's torment fully.

Like the cherry on an ice cream sundae, "Picture Bride" is topped with a genial cameo by Toshiro Mifune as a benshi, or narrator, of the silent films he presents to the workers right smack in the fields.

Real People
by Emily Carter
Minnesota Reader, May 1995

Unexpectedly wonderful, Picture Bride portrays love as a good thing.

In Spring Snow, Yukio Mishima¹s novel of frustrated love, there is a stunning piece of concrete detail when the heroine hangs wet sheets on a clothesline. In the warm and breezy afternoon, the wind suddenly lifts one of the sheets and it splashes against her cheek, leaving it cool and wet. "It was a cold, refreshing slap," Mishima wrote. Picture Bride strikes you in the same manner, unexpected and delightful, light as air, but with enough of a sting to make a strong impression.

What's so refreshing about Kayo Hatta's movie is as much about what it's not as it is--the story of a Japanese "picture bride" (one of the many women who came to Hawaii to marry men they knew only on the strength of a photograph, a few letters and a prayer) easily could have been another relentlessly didactic tract on racism, sexism, capitalism, colonialism--you name it. All these things are present in the film, but Hatta treats them as the reality in which the characters move, rather than the subject of the film itself.

We are given the world of a turn-of-the-century sugarcane plantation. Instead of highlighting the evils inherent in the system. Hatta lets us watch as the real people in the story swim around inside these parameters.. What this does is impart is a sense of reality and immediacy to the narrative; instead of distancing us from her characters by giving us a political perspective they would not have shared, she puts us right with them in the lush green cane fields, working our butts off.

Riyo, the picture bride in question, is played exquisitely by Youki Kudoh with a mixture of stoic reserve and bratty sullenness. Seeking to escape shame and spinsterhood, she signs on as a "picture bride," consenting to an arranged marriage with Matsuji (Akira Takayama), a cane-field worker in Hawaii. The whole arranged marriage, wherein mates are chose by virtue of their family connections, does seem a little cold-blooded, compared to the occidental tradition of picking a mate to satisfy some deep-rooted, twisted psychological compulsion. East or West, we don't always get what we bargain for.

Matsuji, for example, writes haiku to promise Riyo a tropical paradise, and his picture gives her hope--he's very handsome. When she arrives in the new world, however, she realizes she's been duped by an old photograph--her intended is at least 20 years older than his picture would indicate. Instead of the paradise he has promised her, he gives her only long days at the back-breaking work of cutting sugarcane. She's furious, frightened and proudly resists his advances, planning to earn enough money in the fields for her passage back to Japan.

The stage is set for a Piano-esque love tragedy; you cast our eye about on the supporting cast, wondering who will emerge as the redemptive lover. The brutal but tormented foreman? The juicy young Filipino laborer? Riyo's new friend, the indomitable laundress? How will the cruel patriarchal system thwart their happiness and leave the heroine in a suicidal condition? Fortunately, none of this comes to pass, and while we do get a love story, it's an unexpected one. Riyo and her husband move slowly toward each other in a touching, believable human dance. She is proud, stubborn and alone. He is a hardworking, lonely man who wants a wife, a partner and a sexual companion. It's to the filmmaker's credit that we understand both points of view, and sympathize with both her resistance and his yearning. They both are also entirely human: She's a bit of a pill, he's a bit of a dolt--together they would make a perfect married couple.

The filmmaker shows remarkable economy and clarity when it comes to both her characters and her setting. We learn all we need to know about the husband, his sweetness and surliness watching a few brief interactions with his friends and his young wife. In the same way, we learn all we need to know about Hawaii from the distilled viewpoint of the director. Tossing out picture-postcard views, Hatta gives us a canefield, a hut, one brief excursion to a waterfall, and a scene on a beach where the people are more compelling than the sparkling waves. Using these few brush strokes, she makes us see Hawaii the way it would look to the characters: lush but claustrophobic, simultaneously alien and familiar.

Hatta has a sharply cutting eye for the relevant that's reminiscent of Raymond Carver's best short stories. There is no fat in her story. What is presented gleams with emotional resonance: Early on we see Matsuji, in a gesture of pragmatic gentleness, drawing the blankets around his exhausted, sleeping wife. Later in the film Riyo falls asleep in the field, having gone their to mourn the death of her best friend Kana (Tamlyn Tomita). A breeze gently blows two huge green banana leaves over her sleeping form, as if her dead friend, or the jungly field itself, was tucking her in. The motif speaks soft volumes about the ability of both men and nature to display moments of tender grace. And it's all done without the benefit of the usual discursive bludgeon.

So many films and stories deal with the more glamorous and psychotic aspects of love. Watch the movies long enough and you will believe all people do is have frantic sex standing up and play nasty games of verbal Ping-Pong with each other. Love, according to the movies and a couple of friends of mine, is one long, weird sadomasochistic death-dance. In this film, however, love is actually good for the people in it. Learning to love and accept her husband is part of Riyo's spiritual development. She becomes a wife as she becomes a person in her own right. The husband learns what it is not to be alone, and what it's like to need someone else. In a very subtle way, the movie is a convincing argument for family, friendship and connection, as refreshingly unexpected as a splash of cool water on a hot afternoon.