Picture Bride (1995)

Good concept, poorly executed.

Absolutely Brilliant!

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

After watching the superb French Neo-Noir The Connection,I started looking for other titles about to go from Netflix UK. Recently keeping a look out for unique movies from Asia,I stumbled on a landmark Asian American work,which led to me taking a photo.The plot-Japan 1918:After the death of her dad,Riyo's aunt makes arrangements for her to be a "picture bride",where a marriage is arranged via exchanging of photos. Shown a photo of hunky Matsuji,Riyo agrees to the wedding. Leaving Japan for a plantation field in Hawaii,Riyo gets set to meet handsome Matsuji. Meeting Matsuji,Riyo is shocked to discover a less than picture perfect likeness. View on the film:Given the film a much needed moment of lightness, Toshirô Mifune gives a very funny performance as The Benshi in his penultimate role,which gives cheeky nods to his Kurosawa work. Drained of any hope when she meets Matsuji for the first time, Youki Kudoh gives an exquisite performance as Riyo,with Riyo's painful desire to escape being one that Matsuji expresses with a simmering murmur and a cold shoulder towards Matsuji (played by a terrific Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa.) Painting her debut,co-writer/(with Diane Mei Lin Mark & Mari Hatta) director Kayo Hatta (who drowned in 2005) and cinematographer Claudio Rocha give Riyo's pain a strikingly lyrical quality,via the weaving of songs and sounds of moving plants giving the title an oddly supernatural atmosphere. Largely holding back from big melodrama scenes,Hatta gets under the relationship of Riyo and Matsuji by stiltedly going round the plantation in picture perfect shots.

The story of 16-year-old Riyo who journeys to Hawaii in 1918 to marry a man she has never met, except through photographs and letters they have exchanged. Hoping to escape a troubled past and to start anew, Riyo is bitterly disappointed upon her arrival: her husband is twice her age and Hawaii is not the paradise she expected.What really stands out about this film is the look on the new bride's face. I understand her shock of meeting her husband and finding him to be old, but she maintains this look of shock and despair for quite a while. I would expect a marriage like this to be something you accept if you are going to go into it, but she had clearly not thought it through.Also, historically, it is interesting to consider the role the Japanese had in Hawaii. Americans who may not know about Hawaiian history or culture might only connect Japan to the Pearl Harbor attack, but it happens to be the case that a great many Japanese had settled on the islands. At the time Hawaii became a state (1959), there may have been more Japanese than Europeans there.

Picture Bride has an excellent look into Hawaii's past and the people who lived there in that time. The time, money earned and the hours that these people had put into their lives to survive and live, takes a whole new meaning to blood, sweat and tears.The concept of dating/matchmaking is something like what we do similar today via the net. Just that is more of snail mail. Very slow snail mail.The singing of the plantation's songs from the workers reminds me of the southern plantation workers' songs of their demise and future goals.The movie shows the hardship as well as soft romantic scenes that Hawaii can bring. Like the stillness of a storm coming and the sudden chaos of the rain and then the tranquility.

The first time I saw PICTURE BRIDE, I felt a bit let down, feeling the story was a bit commonplace. Also, being from Hawaii, I felt the petty impulse to begrudge the few (very few) slightly misleading geographical and historical moments in the film. Now, five years later, I like the movie better. Its cinematography is beautiful, and if the plot is sometimes predictable, it's still handled sensitively. The film leaves you with a strong sense of a time and setting that no longer exists.