Despite its visual beauty, I can’t quite get my head around Sakuran (dir. Ninagawa Mika). In its stunning use of colors, this film is on a par with Godard’s Chinoise. Each frame is constructed with colors as one of the most important element. Colors are used as contrast, as drama, as backdrop, as tension. Almost the entire film baths in bright hues and for that particular reason, a rainy scene with subdued color scales comes as a shock. The camera is mostly static. This fact, plus the intrusive, yet striking, colors makes for a slightly claustrophobic viewing experience – which is precisely the point. The film is about the dream of escape, of freeing oneself from a closed surrounding. This surrounding is a brothel from the Edo period. The center of the story is a young girl who is expected to become a courtesan (or a mere prostitute). She feels trapped, but is included into the routines and norms of the colorful brothel, which contain several hierarchies, both among the workers and the customers. She suceeds in her career, so that she attracts the most important clients, and she falls in love - an impossible thing in this context? The problem with the film, for me, is that I soon lost interest in the story, losing myself in the world of hues and frame composition. That’s why I don’t have much to say about this film, expect that it is original, a Japanese Moulin Rouge perhaps, that creates something unexpected and contemporary from historical material. This imaginative film comprises many dramatic turns and flashy melodrama (in my opinion, too much).
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