MOVIE REVIEW : UNCOVERING FACADES IN ‘MAKE-UP’

“Make-Up” (at the Kokusai) is the perfect title for a film that depicts women putting on facades in order to deal with men and that also ends on a note of reconciliation, with a woman and her three daughters at last accepting themselves and one another. Indeed, the mother and one of her daughters make up together after an estrangement.

A classic women’s picture in the grand manner, “Make-Up” has a soap opera plot but has been so sensitively directed by Kazuo Ikehiro that it can stand as a feminist comment on the fact that it’s still a man’s world, at least in Japan. Yet in the course of the year that spans one cherry blossom season to the next each of the woman’s daughters has struggled to take charge of her own destiny.

The mothers and her daughters could well be the most beautiful women in all Japan (and who also wear some of the most gorgeous kimonos ever photographed). The mother (Machiko Kyo) is an ex-geisha, a traditionalist to the core, who runs a venerable Kyoto restaurant and is eager to see it stay in the family. Her eldest daughter (Keiko Matsuzaka), also a former geisha, can’t succeed her mother because, born illegitimate, she wasn’t recognized by her father. Instead, she runs her own posh restaurant in Tokyo and has allowed herself to become consumed with punishing her twin sister’s lover (Juzo Itami) for driving the sister to suicide. Meanwhile, her next youngest sister (Kimiko Ikegami), trapped into a loveless arranged marriage and into inheriting the management of the restaurant, begins an affair with a married man (Muga Takewaki). The youngest sister (Yuuko Kazu), understandably, is determined to live her own life, avoiding her sisters’ fates.

Amid all the heart-tugging, writers Yozo Tanaka and Keiji Nagao, in adapting a novel by Junichi Watanabe, have nevertheless written fully developed roles in which their actresses excel. Indeed, it’s not within memory that the ageless Kyo, star of “Rashomon, “Ugetsu” and “Gate of Hell,” the three films that 30 years ago established the Japanese cinema internationally, has had a part so worthy of her.

“Make-Up” (Times-rated Mature because of it has little interest to children) is too melodramatic to be compared to the great Mizoguchi films about women or even to Kon Ichikawa’s recent and impressive “The Makioka Sisters.” But it does take us into a world in which women, including geisha in exquisite dance and song, are still expected to dedicate their lives to pleasing men.

‘MAKE-UP’

A Shochiku presentation. Executive producer Masatake Wakita. Director Kazuo Ikehiro. Screenplay Yozo Tanaka, Keiji Nagao; based on a novel by Junichi Watanabe. Camera Noritaka Sakamoto. Music Shigeru Ikeno. Art directors Yoshinobu Nishioka, Shigemori Shigeta. Film editor Hikoji Goto. With Keiko Matsuzaka, Kimiko Ikegami, Yuuko Kazu, Machiko Kyo, Akira Emoto, Kiichi Nakai, Juzo Itami, Muga Takewaki, Akira Nakao, Norihei Miki. In Japanese, with English subtitles.

Running time: 2 hours, 17 minutes. Times-rated: Mature.