I’ve let this whole “Japanese Beat Cinema” kick run on way longer than I originally planned, and with your indulgence I’ll send it off with one last trip to the well: Keisuke Kinoshita’s Carmen Comes Home. Hailing as it does from 1951, this is a shade older than the rest of the films we’ve been exploring these best several weeks, but it definitely plays with the same themes: teenagers, sex, the generation gap, and what happens when (poorly translated) American values intrude into traditional Japan.
I’ll admit this is not likely to be familiar to anyone—I don’t believe it’s had a proper US release, ever. It’s not on YouTube. I ran across it on DVD as part of a set of “100 Years of Japanese Cinema” that was published in Hong Kong, but it’s long out of print. So, I’m talking about a movie that no one else has seen, and no one is really going to be see very easily. But, don’t be intimidated—that’s kind of point of this post. Go ahead, click the fold, and let’s see what happens when Carmen comes home.
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Watching foreign films in the US is a distorted and distorting cultural experience. We do not get access to a representative selection of films from other countries—we get access only to the movies that specialty distributors think have an American audience.
For one thing, foreign movies do not share theatrical screen space along American films—when they show up here at all, they get shown only in specialist arthouse cinemas (and not every city has one of those). When they get released on disc, those discs aren’t filed by genre—they just get lumped together under the umbrella term “foreign,” as if Seven Samurai has more in common with Amelie by virtue of both being subtitled, than it does with The Magnificent Seven.
Because subtitled films get shown only in specialized venues to audiences who have self-selected to show their interest in such stuff, the movies that do get slotted into those venues are going to be those that meet the tastes of that niche audience, not necessarily the movies most representative of the cultures from which they originate.
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I’ve been fascinated by this phenomenon for a long time—how, for example, a director like Takashi Miike has a huge international following while being considered more or less a hack by Japanese audiences. There’s a whole world of foreign films that get excluded from US distribution because they don’t fit the narrowly defined “arthouse” audience mold. This is funny, because the arthouse concept is all about finding the things that Hollywood excludes. It gives me a perverse thrill to seek out the things that Hollywood and arthouse cinema both exclude. Which led me, among other things, to Carmen Comes Home.
Director Keisuke Kinoshita does not have the international cachet of better-known peers like Akira Kurosawa or Yasuijiro Ozu, but he was better loved by Japanese audiences. Part of the reason he didn’t catch on with the international arthouse crowd so much was his journeyman approach—he made films in all genres, and experimented with different styles. He was a very talented filmmaker with a deep bench of skills and a flexible aesthetic that prioritized the needs of each individual project, but he didn’t have a brand identity.
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Kinoshita was more or less born to the movies—as a small child at the dawn of the twentieth century he could imagine no other future than making movies. His parents thought otherwise, though, so he decided to run away. His grandfather retrieved him, and his exasperated parents finally relented. Having won the first fight, he then faced rejection from the studios. Patiently, he paid his dues and worked his way up the ranks from lowly cameraman to his desired prize, director. Having achieved his dream, he proceeded to carpe the hell out of that diem and make a staggering 42 films in his first 23 years.
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Meanwhile, there’s another player in our story—an actress named Hideko Takamine. You may know her best as the star of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, a 1960 Japanese drama that has been embraced by the arthouse crowd. Takamine was also born to the movies—she was a child star at age 5. She and Kinoshita worked together for the first time when she was just 9, and he was still a cameraman. Twenty years later, they teamed up again to make Carmen Comes Home.
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This was the 30th anniversary of Shochiku studios, and so the company decided to mark the occasion by making their anniversary release in Fujicolor—and so it came to pass that Carmen was the first ever color film made in Japan. This posed several technical and logistical challenges. For one, the color stock required lots of light—so Carmen was filmed entirely outdoors in the rural Japanese countryside, making for a gloriously beautiful but decidedly atypical-looking production. Also, because the color prints took a full month to hand-process and cost 8 times as much as a standard B&W print, the studio only ponied up for two color prints. The majority of audiences who saw this in 1951 saw it in B&W—which meant a separate B&W version had to be made. Due to technical limitations, that B&W version had to be shot separately—it wasn’t an option to run off B&W prints from the color negative. What this meant on the ground was that after he got he desired take of each shot, Kinoshita swapped out the color camera for a B&W one and filmed it again.
I hear you objecting. That makes no sense, you say. Why not just have the color and B&W cameras side-by-side and filming at the same time? Well, because the cast had to slather red makeup all over themselves to make their skin tones register correctly in the green-inflected Fujicolor stock, and that makeup made them look very dark in B&W. So they didn’t just have to swap the cameras, they had to redo their makeup for each and every shot.
This absurd working method led Hideko Takamine to declare that making this film nearly killed her.
And if that sounds like an exaggeration, just consider how much red makeup she had to apply, remove, and reapply given how much skin she shows throughout the film.
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Which means it’s about time we finally discussed what this movie is actually about. Takamine plays Okin, a simple farm girl from the Japanese sticks who ran away from home to get into show business (sound familiar?). She turns into a successful dancer in Tokyo, and decides to return home to visit her estranged family and mend fences. She is now called “Lily Carmen” (in one of the film’s recurring jokes, no one is able to pronounce her Westernized stage name, mangling it into “Jiji Carumen” or some such). Bringing her bubble-gum-chewing best friend Maya (Toshiko Kobayashi) in tow, Lily Carmen is expecting to be showered with adulation. Meanwhile, the town is excited to be visited by such a great artist from the Big City.
And so for the first hour or so, everyone in the film obsesses over the idea of “art,” and the importance of art and culture to Japan’s future, and how Carmen and Maya are great artists, no matter how weirdly or rudely they behave… And all the while, the audience gradually cottons on to the fact that Carmen and Maya’s “artistic dancing” simply means they are popular strippers.
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Meanwhile, they are contrasted with another homegrown artist, a sensitive composer named Taguchi (Shuji Sano). He’s a hard luck case, though—he was blinded in the war, and now relies on his long-suffering wife (Kuniko Igawa) to do the hard farming work while he composes songs. Of course, composing songs is made all the harder when they have to sell his harmonium to pay the bills.
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The town organizes a cultural festival in part to honor the exotic dancers and in part to showcase Taguchi’s latest composition. Unfortunately, Maya loses her skirt in the middle of the proceedings, provoking a reaction from the crowd that Taguchi (unable to see what happened) mistakes for his own humiliation.
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Desperate to make amends, the girls collaborate with the local equivalent of The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns to put on their striptease show. Exactly why they think taking their clothes off for money will solve everyone’s problem is unclear (although it is explained that Lily Carmen was kicked in the head by a cow when she was young and her thought processes are a little scrambled), but the glory of it is, she’s right. Their strip show does save the day: paying off various debts, bringing a little joy to everyone’s tough lives, making the misery Mr. Burn’s knock-off less of a bastard, and buying back Taguchi’s harmonium. Everyone wins, and it’s a happy ending for all concerned.
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If you get a chance to see Carmen Comes Home, obviously you should seize that opportunity, and when you do, please note how the girls scandalize and embarrass all the men they encounter, but inspire and thrill the women. The town is certainly misguided in expecting that these two “artists” would bring big city culture and glamour to the small town, but as far as the town’s women go, there is no sight half as empowering as seeing these two strippers save the day.
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Since actually seeing this film is a bit of a challenge, let me try to frame it in terms of things that are maybe easier to find. If you’ve seen any of the Tora-San Japanese comedies, Carmen has very much the same vibe, enough to be a female version of Tora-San. Closer to home, it has a very similar tone to the various Glenda Farrell Pre-Code comedies of the 1930s. You could have a fun double-header showing this back-to-back with Girl Missing (which I wrote up here once upon a time). But not even Pre-Code comedies would have embraced the sexuality of their female leads with quite so much gusto. So many movies (especially American ones) frame female sexuality exclusively as something threatening, it is absolutely bracing to find a film equating sexual freedom with heroism (even if it’s a bumbling, airheaded accidental kind of heroism).
Shochiku had decided that, as a company, they were going to aggressively court female audiences. Their demographers had determined that not only were women a massive audience in their own right, and an audience going largely unserved by their competitors, but that women tended to bring dates or friends to the movies with them, so marketing to their tastes had a huge potential upside. And in internal memos, they advised their writers and directors that the way to appeal to women was to make movies illustrating how “conventional morality holds women back.” Just imagine a Hollywood studio authoring a memo like that!
