Gishiki

For a Central European, it is certainly valuable as an insight into the functioning of a Japanese patriarchal family, otherwise an excellent geological exploration of all-time sediments within one Japanese personality. The viewer is confronted with the male character's thoroughly personal search for lost time, whose retrospections propel us towards the goal just like Shinkansens and ships on the present plane. It is touching to observe the patient's discourse - yes, the patient's, because the "narrative" recollection of the main protagonist speaks to us just like a patient from a psychoanalytic couch - constantly revolving around old traumas, in the depths of the past, constantly dissected and cut up into new segments and reanalyzed. Touching - always precisely at the moment when the character examines the past, the present eludes him. The passivity that begets paralysis by the past is permanent for the main character - he is always forced to exchange today's satisfaction for (at best) the satisfaction of some problem in the past. (Example: Masuo has the opportunity to obtain the object of his desire, Satsuko, but instead goes to resolve the will of his father, who has been dead for 10 years; subsequently, he has the opportunity to obtain the object of his love, Ritsuko, and instead he deals with his deceased mother.) (05.08.2015)