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Picture Bride
R1 - America - Lions Gate Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: James-Masaki Ryan (30th August 2015). |
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The Film
 "Picture Bride" (1994) At the beginning of the 20th century, photography modernized the tradition of arranged marriages in Asia. In place of face-to-face meetings, families and matchmakers used photographs to introduce prospective couples living in different parts of the country or even across the ocean. Between 1907 and 1924, more than 20,000 young Japanese, Okinawan, and Korean women journeyed to Hawaii to become the wives of the men they only knew in photographs and letters. They were called “Picture Brides”. Taking place in 1918, 16-year old Riyo Nakamura (played by Youki Kudoh) having lost both of her parents decides to become a “Picture Bride”, to find a new life in Hawaii. She is shown a picture of a handsome man living in Hawaii, and so she has her picture taken by a photographer and sent to Hawaii for him. Moving from the bustling port city of Yokohama, she arrives in Hawaii by ship with a horde of other picture brides also seeking for a new future. When she meets the man in the picture for the first time, she is confused as the man in the picture looks very different from the man in front of her, looking much older in person. The 43-year old man, Matsuji (played by Akira Takayama) apologizes, saying the picture was taken years ago. After a mass Christian marriage ceremony to a group of Japanese picture brides to their new husbands, Riyo arrives at her new home: a small farmhouse around a sugarcane field, far and away a very different place from her Yokohama home. On their “wedding night”, she refuses Matsuji, as she is scared and admits she made a big mistake with her choice of coming to Hawaii. Things don’t get much easier for her working in the fields. The women are also expected to work in the sugar cane fields along with the men, and it is the first time Riyo experiences hard physical labor outdoors. The fields are run by white farmers, with Antone (played by James Grant Benton) telling the immigrant workers what to do. The Japanese workers sing songs while working to ease the pain, but Riyo cannot endure the physical and mental hardship, and she almost faints on her first day in the field. An older female worker Yayoi (played by Kati Kuroda) tries to help Riyo, as does Kana (played by Tamlyn Tomita), a woman a few years older than Riyo. Kana was also a picture bride, who has been working in the fields for some time and also has a child with her husband Kanzaki (played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). She has gotten tough over time, persevering through the hardships of moving to Hawaii as a picture bride, marrying a man she didn’t know, the heat and mental anguish - which are all things Riyo is going through. Both Kana and Yayoi become mentors to Riyo rather than “friends”. It’s not only work that she must learn, but also the language. Though Riyo can speak a little English by working in a café in Yokohama with many foreign customers, she still has difficulty speaking basic English. And with the locals speaking Hawaiian pidgin English, that also confuses her more. Riyo continues to be withdrawn from Matsuji as a wife, not having sexual relations with him and telling him that her wish is to leave him and save enough money to return to Japan. But saving money will not be easy, as wages for farmers are too cheap for travel. How long will Riyo be able to stand the new life in Hawaii? Will she endure it and continue her farm life in Hawaii or will she find a way back to Japan? “Picture Bride” is based on the stories of many Japanese women who went through the arranged marriage process in the early 20th century. With over 200,000 Japanese that emigrated to Hawaii and California in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, men looked to find Japanese brides from Japan. Also with the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907, no more Japanese could immigrate to the United States for work, while Japanese who were already residing in the United States could continue to live where they were. The only way a Visa could be issued for someone in Japan was if the person was a family member or a potential mate. This was also explored in the 1993 film “Come See the Paradise” (which also stars Tamlyn Tomita), in which a white man could not marry his Japanese girlfriend in California in 1940. Interracial marriage was illegal in the parts of the United States at the time (including California), so a Japanese man could not marry a white woman and vice versa. As it was financially quite unfeasible for many Japanese men in foreign countries to return to Japan to look for a potential wife, a system was made for photographs to be sent back to Japan, and a matchmaker (or “nakado”) would find potential brides. Once a return photograph of the woman, “the picture bride” was sent and agreed on by the male suitor, the family registry in Japan would be changed, and the woman would be issued a passport to immigrate to the suitor’s residence. As soon as the brides would arrive, they would meet the male suitors and a mass wedding ceremony with the multiple couples would take place under a Christian minister most likely at the port of disembarkation. Many women were a bit deceived by the men’s pictures, as they would send a picture from their younger years in their nicest clothes (as the character of Matsuji did in the film), or they would send a picture of a better looking friend instead. But some things never change as even now, people’s profiles on dating websites or apps like Tinder often have “manipulated” photos or photos of completely different people just to get the attention the potential mate. For the men, their main objective was to find a wife for companionship and to continue the family bloodline. For women on the other hand, they had varying reasons for finding a suitor overseas. For some of the women (like Riyo in the film) it was to find a better life overseas, especially financially. Others did it to escape from their own families. One part of the picture bride process that Japanese women did not have to worry about was “filial piety”, an obligation toward the parents of the husband. In other words, they didn’t have to worry about taking care of the in-laws, which even in western culture might seem like a dream come true for some. A small spoiler for a later moment in “Picture Bride”: For the character of Riyo, she had her reasons of becoming a picture bride - one was that she didn’t have any more family to turn to with the death of both of her parents. A key point revealed late in the film is that her parents died from Tuberculosis, which is something she did not reveal to Matsuji before the marriage process. At the time TB was thought of being hereditary and also contagious (although it is now known that it is not hereditary), so for Riyo to find a potential mate in Japan would be nearly impossible, as men would all stay away from anyone whose parents died of TB. “Picture Bride” was co-written and directed by Kayo Hatta, born and raised in Hawaii and had a grandmother that went through the picture bride process in the early 20th century. Originally, the film was planned to be made as a short film Hatta was student at UCLA. But the ambitious story was too big for a short film, and the project grew with larger and larger over time after graduation. Hatta made short films and documentaries over the years, but her dream to make “Picture Bride” into a reality came in 1994 when she was 36 years old back in Hawaii. Only one independent full length film was made with Hawaiian money prior to “Picture Bride”, so raising money and finding talent was difficult. Locals helped as much as possible for production, but for authenticity in front of the camera, Hatta wanted to cast actual Japanese actors and actresses for many of the parts. And for the English dialogue, she made sure to use Hawaiian pidgin English, using Hawaiian terms throughout the film in the dialogue naturally. Youki Kudoh was already known to international audiences as the young 18-year old girl in the Jim Jarmusch directed 1989 film “Mystery Train” speaking broken English. A fashion model, actress, and singer in Japan, Kudoh actually spoke very good English already but had to tone it down for the role of Riyo. Initially Hatta thought it was a mistake casting Kudoh as she was a young girl of modern beauty as she might not fit into the non-make-up non elegant farming role. But in front of the cameras Kudoh pulled it off quite naturally as the lost ”city girl”. Her performance is not over-the-top at all but very restrained. Holding back her feelings internally, there are not many scenes of Riyo bawling in tears, screaming, or physical anger. Hollywood standards may use those for dramatic expression, but not here, which is one of the weaker points in the film. Not to fault Kudoh, but if there were dream sequences to fulfill the viewpoint of what was going through her mind, it may have helped the emotional depth to be fully realized rather than just implied. Most of the other actors like Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Tamlyn Tomita already had experience on their resumes acting in American TV series and films at this point. Not much of the background of the actor Akira Takayama is known. He has fluent Japanese skills, and speaks in the Kumamoto dialect which is quite difficult to pull off, even for a native Japanese actor. Whether he is from Kumamoto originally is not known, but Takayama has played many bit roles in the subsequent years, including “Snow Falling on Cedars” in 1999 which reunited him with Youki Kudoh. The biggest and most surprising casting role is that of the legendary Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. In an extremely far fetch, Hatta wrote a fan letter to Mifune and asked for him to possibly play a small role in her first feature length indie film. Wishful thinking became a dream come true, as Mifune actually accepted the role of a traveling “benshi”, a narrator for silent films, to arrive at the plantation to project a silent film outdoors. Since he was the biggest star on the set, he was constantly signing autographs and constantly watched by everyone on the cast and crew in awe for his brief scenes. Although he never showed it toward the cameras or the crew, he was slightly ill during the shoot. He was diagnosed with cancer after production and died in 1997 from cancer, making “Picture Bride” and the 1995 film “Deep River” his final film performances. For the basis of the story, Hatta took inspiration from not just her grandmother’s story, but from other elderly women who experienced the picture bride process and was a hybrid of many people’s memories. Interesting to note is the supernatural element infused to the story. Many Japanese stories involve "yokai" (monsters) and "yurei" (ghosts) and Hawaiian stories also have an element of the supernatural, including most famously the legend of Ohi'a and Lehua. “Picture Bride” also has some supernatural elements scattered throughout, but this is one of the weaker elements of the film. Films featuring ghosts and other supernatural elements since the early days of film used smoke, mirrors, and camera techniques to convey something otherworldly, but “Picture Bride” mostly plays things straight. The only portion to play something supernatural was near the end on the rocks shot day-for-night, but that is arguable. Cinematically the mysterious elements of the supernatural were portrayed a bit poorly in the film. There are major similarities between “Picture Bride” and the 1950 Roberto Rossellini directed film “Stromboli” - both films take place on a volcanic island, both have main characters of a wife who marries not for love but for escape, the struggle being a wife in an unhappy marriage, and even the ending scenes (spoiler) in which the wife walks along the rocks as a physical and metaphorical escape. The field scenes, especially the burning sequence looks heavily inspired by Terrence Malick’s 1978 film “Days of Heaven”, although director Hatta has not mentioned either of the films as inspiration. She has mentioned that Kaneto Shindo’s 1964 film “Onibaba” had a stylistic influence, with the shots of the flowing grass in the film, the intense environment, and the supernatural horror portions for example. “Picture Bride” as screened at Cannes in 1994 and then at Sundance in 1995, where it won the Audience Award for dramatic film. The film was picked up by Miramax films for distribution in the United States, but was not met with much success in box office numbers, not finding a major audience theatrically or on home video subsequently. The film was released by JVC in Japan theatrically in 1996 and on video but also did not find an audience. Hatta continued working in television and film in later years winning various awards from Asian-American and Hawaiian organizations, but was not able to direct another full length film, being unable to find studio funding. Sadly in 2005, Hatta died at the age of 47 in an accidental drowning in California. Besides the Sundance Audience Award, the film also won a Special Award at the Political Film Society in 1996. Note this is a region 1 NTSC DVD, playable on a region 1 or a region free DVD player.
Video
The film is presented in the original theatrical 1.85:1 aspect ratio in anamorphic widescreen in the NTSC format. The film print used for the transfer has some occasional specs and dirt on it, but nothing too distracting while viewing. Colors of the green sugar cane grass and the red dirt of the Hawaiian ground look good, but not up to the current standards of high definition remasters. This may have been an adequate transfer for a 10-year old film back in 2004, but a bit low compared to today’s remastering standards. The film runs uncut with the runtime of 94:45.
Audio
There is only one audio track for the film: English/Japanese Dolby Digital 2.0 surround. The dialogue is 50/50 Hawaiian pidgin English and Japanese, with minor instances of Tagalog and Hawaiian language portions. The dialogue is always clear and the music comes through fine in the front, but the surrounds are very rarely used. There are 2 subtitle tracks available for the main feature. Optional English (for the non-English portions), English HoH (for the English portions) The default subtitles are the English subtitles for the non-English portions of the film. The subtitles are quite good and no problems in translation. The English HoH subtitles on the other hand, someone messed up on this subtitle track… English HoH subtitles for a multilingual film should translate all the dialogue: English and everything else. Strangely, this track captions the English portions of the film only. All the Japanese dialogue has no subtitles with this option. So anyone wanting to watch the film with “Full” subtitles has to switch between “English” and “English HoH” on the remote constantly while watching the film. Both are in a thin yellow font.
Extras
Considering the film had a weak box office take, it’s surprising that Miramax put together a fine selection of supplements for the DVD. Audio commentary with director Kayo Hatta A screen specific commentary with a lot of interesting information including shot-by-shot breakdowns, what specifically her grandmother went through, the one major suggestion that Harvey Weinstein made (which was a good one, actually), the very quick cameo by Jason Scott Lee hot off the success of "Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story", and much more. Speaking solo, Hatta does not break for “ums” or “uhs” that many other first-time commentary speakers go through. “The Picture Bride Journey” documentary (36:01) This lengthy documentary includes 2004 interviews with Kayo Hatta and actresses Youki Kudoh and Tamlyn Tomita, with behind the scenes VHS footage, test footage, and more. The casting process, the background information on picture brides, footage of the Sundance premiere and award acceptance, as well as the Hawaii premiere with surviving Japanese picture brides in their 90’s attending are shown. In 1.33:1, in English “Picture Bride” sung by Youki Kudoh (4:53) Youki Kudoh sings the theme song in English created for the soundtrack, with shots from the film playing on screen. In 1.33:1, in English Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo Theatrical Trailer (1:55) The original narrated trailer, which also heavily emphasizes the “special appearance” by Toshio Mifune. In 1.33:1 Bonus Trailer for "Miramax New Golden Age" (2:31) A montage trailer for various Miramax films. In 1.33;1
Packaging
Miramax released the film on DVD in 2004, 10 years after the Cannes debut. In 2011 the Miramax DVD was reissued by Lionsgate, which was exactly the same disc but with the Lionsgate logo on the package and printed on the disc itself.
Overall
“Picture Bride” is a fascinating story, but the film itself is not quite a lost masterpiece. Historically it is an important part of Hawaiian and Japanese history that many people are unaware of, and deserves to be remembered. Praise should be given to the realism depicted but if only more effort was given to the mystique it could have listed the status up to a much higher film. The bonus features on the disc are great, so people who are interested should not hesitate to pick this up.
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