Memory & Desire

The body of a young, Japanese man floats ashore in the waves of New Zealand. The woman who has to be held back is his new wife, the woman he defied his harsh mother in order to marry.
The two meet at the common workplace. Keiji is young, beautiful, intelligent and well-educated. Sayo is far further down on the social scale of Japan. She is a few years older and more experienced, both emotionally and sexually. Herfreedom and honesty attract Keiji. She does not see to Keiji's successful surface, she loves him for his beautiful inner qualities. They complement each other.
If Sayo liberates him, then Keiji's mother imprisons him.
She is a widow, she loves him over everything else on earth and she dreams of a nice marriage - with a daughter-in-law far more special than Sayo. The couple flee this unbending mother and get married
in reclusion in New Zealand. The honey moon is spent on a typical tourist bus across the country. Every day they come
to new places and new motel rooms, and every day their intensive love for each other grows. But Keiji is incapable of expressing his feelings for Sayo physically, which hurts both of them immensely. Keiji's death is sudden, and Sayo is about
to go under with grief. She is forced to return to Tokyo to, according to tradition, live with her mother-in-law and her accusatory looks. The big city seems claustrophobic and closed-in compared to the open landscape of New Zealand. Sayo decides to return and try to find peace in the wild surroundings. Suddenly she can identify with the th i ngs that scared her duri ng the first trip.
Sayo's journey is not exactly special, but it is heroic on an individual scale. The film's director Niki Caro says that, ''Women's journeys are interesting and women are more than people's lovers and people's daughters and people's wives. There's very strong material there, which I believe we'll see a lot more of in my lifetime''. She claims to be interested in human nature, in going deeper and looking beyond the surface of people. The Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu understood, she says. That the most important factor in story-telling is the human factor. That everything actually is about family drama.
ANGELICA TlBBLIN CHEN

Premiärstatus
Skandinavisk premiär: Medverkande
Yuri Kinugawa,Eugene Nomura,Yoko Narahashi: Producent
Owen Hughes: Manus
Niki Caro: Foto
Dion Bebe: Musik
Peter Scholes: Talat språk
English