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Sakuran is a real feast for the eyes
28 August 2008
The courtesan world of 17th-century Japan is lushly and often erotically summoned up in Mika Ninagawa’s film about Kiyoha, a rebellious eight-year-old urchin sold to a brothel in Yoshiwara province, who becomes the favourite of its often elderly customers and knows she can escape only by getting one of her clients to marry her. Unfortunately she falls for a young man with no money.
Superb costumes and production design elaborate a story which in essence is much like many Edo costume dramas concentrating, as the great Mizoguchi used to do, on the unchanging fate of women. But in this case it is orchestrated by Ninagawa, a prominent photographer, with enough audacity to overlay the film with superbly vivid colour, some quickfire editing and a partially modern soundtrack.
She secures a fine performance from Anna Tsuchiya as the beautiful, doll-like young woman who determines to learn exactly what satisfies men in order to dominate them the better, and from Yoshino Kimura as the prostitute from whom she learns her trade. If it is all a little like an arty novelette, there’s no doubt it is a feast for the eye.
Sakuran
Cert: 15
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