Watashi wa Nisai
After the Berlinale, I grew more interested in Kon Ichikawa’s films. He is not in my directors list, because I had only seen “The Makioka Sisters” and I didn’t really expect having an interest in him. I had no interest in his magnum opus “The Burmese Harp”, but somehow I should have known that there is more to him than that, just like I care little for Ozu’s “Tokyo Monogatari” or Kurosawa’s “Rashomon” or Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu Monogatari”. By now, Pixelmatsch has seen a bunch of his films at the Berlinale, and so I looked into what else he has done. Since O is now two years old, it is a given that Pip and I wanted to see it. (When will the Myoron family watch a film together? And what shall it be?)
I still somehow don’t pin Kon Ichikawa as a genius like I thought Naruse was after seeing “Tsuruhachi Tsurujiro”, but we certainly liked “Watashi wa Nisai”. It didn’t make us laugh as much as we expected, and it didn’t make us go “this is just like O!”, but both events happened often enough for us to derive much pleasure from the film. As expected, not that much has changed in parenting in 50 years, even if the differences seem huge. Ultimately people all care for their children when they are young, and all children act however they want to some degree before society can successfully mold them into something.
Most of all, I actually really liked the adults: The dad is kind of a fool, and the mother is a worrywart, but all of them are lovely and take life with their child with a certain grain of salt. I enjoyed their utterly normal life, including the grandmother who spoils the child like crazy.
Even though “Watashi wa Nisai” did not generate a reaction as emotional as I expected, seeing it was exactly what we were looking for, and we enjoyed that a well-made slice of life with this particular premise even exists. Even if Kon Ichikawa’s other films were all lackluster, he has my gratitude for adapting the “Makioka Sisters” and our life with O.