Festival To Showcase Culture of Japan : Yamada and His Films to Appear at Bing Theater

It is altogether fitting that Japan Week L.A. 1988 is honoring writer-director Yoji Yamada by calling attention to some key films he has made outside his long-running Tora-san series, now in its record-breaking 39th installment (more than 19 years). In connection with the opening of its Pavilion for Japanese Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is presenting in Bing Theater “The Yellow Handkerchief” (1977) tonight at 8, “Where Spring Comes Late” (1970) Wednesday at 8 p.m. and “A Distant Cry From Spring” (1980) Thursday at 7:30 p.m.

Yamada will introduce the final film at LACMA and will be present Friday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the American Film Institutes’s Film Fest invitational premiere of “Hope and Pain,” which opens a regular run Saturday at the Little Tokyo Cinema 1. (A Tora-san festival has been under way at Little Tokyo Cinema 2 since Sept. 9.)

There’s a sentimental streak in Yamada’s films that at once accounts for their popularity, especially in Japan, and denies him membership--so far--in the very top rank of Japanese film makers to which his contemporaries Shohei Imamura and Masahiro Shinoda belong.

Yet the warmth and gentleness of a Yamada film offers a welcome contrast to Shinoda’s exquisite romantic tragedies and Imamura’s powerful studies of obsessive behavior.

A Yamada film is virtually always enjoyable and a skillfully devised heart-tugger set off by affectionate, occasionally overly broad humor. On

occasion Yamada pictures have swept the Kinema Jumpos, Japan’s Academy Awards.

Yamada, a boyish-looking 57, celebrates nature, picturesque out-of-the way towns and family life in a leisurely fashion. Sometimes it seems that he is single-handedly keeping alive the great humanist tradition of the Japanese cinema exemplified by his renowned mentor, Yasujiro Ozu, and Yamada is a master of the unobtrusively staged, perfectly timed vignette that gives his films much poignancy.

He is concerned with the lives of ordinary people and senses that happiness lies in appreciating everyday life; perhaps the reason why Tora-san, that irascible but kindhearted itinerant peddler, has worn so well for so long is that we can see ourselves in an individual who, if never victorious, is also never defeated.

The Tora-sans have created for Yamada a virtual repertory company to draw upon for cast and crew. Comedian Kiyoshi Atsumi, who plays Tora, and Chieko Baisho, who plays his sister in the series, appear frequently in Yamada’s other films in roles of varying size and importance.

In the Tora-sans, Baisho, one of the most accomplished actresses in films, is restricted to seeming eternally kind and patient, but in “Where Spring Comes Late” and “A Distant Cry From Spring” she has the opportunity to reveal her range.

“Hope and Pain” is vintage Yamada, a bittersweet glance back at Japan under the Occupation, a time when the director was coming of age--as are the young people of this tender and amusing film.

Set in 1948 in one of Yamada’s typically quaint picture-book towns, it records the final year of an old-style high school, a victim of postwar educational reforms.

In adapting Akira Hayasaka’s autobiographical novel, Yamada and his usual co-writer Yoshitaka Asama clearly admire the quality of teaching--the film centers on a college-level German literature course--under the old system, but at the same time they celebrate the exhilarating freedom the students are experiencing under democracy.

In episodic fashion, Yamada tells of the exploits and experiences of a group of friends--of how, for example, they shelter a young abandoned prostitute in their dormitory only to discover that for all their teen-age sexual frustration they are too honorable to allow her to repay their kindness with sex.

Their German class stages a play, which means the film’s tall, gangling hero (Hashinosuke Nakamura) will fall in love with its adorable leading lady (Hiroko Yakushimaru), recruited from the girls high school.

A kind of “Japanese Graffiti,” “Hope and Pain” is a beautiful film that expresses poignantly the contradictory emotions evoked by that period of turbulent and drastic changes in which Yamada and his generation attained adulthood.

Based on the same Reader’s Digest short story by Pete Hamill that inspired the popular song “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree,” Yamada’s “The Yellow Handkerchief” is a straightforward odyssey film with humor and pathos that ends with a sure-fire heart tug. That’s where the handkerchief, used as a signal, comes in.

As is so often the case, Yamada has the warmth and the eloquence to make the film’s sentimentality seem honest and therefore appealing.

The story centers on three people who meet on the road and join forces: a hippie-esque fellow (Tetsuya Takeda) fleeing a broken romance in his brand new red Mazda Familia; a train waitress (Kaori Momoi) suffering a similar heartbreak, and a solemn, ill-at-ease loner (Ken Takakura).

“Where Spring Comes Late” may well be Yamada’s finest film, in which a journey becomes a timeless, universal metaphor for everyone’s passage through life.

In this triumph of simplicity we watch the Kazamis, a coal-mining family, depart from their native island in southern Japan to begin a new life in faraway Hokkaido, 1,500 miles to the north.

The Kazamis, who most likely have never been away from home before, commence an odyssey that is to be tinged with tragedy as well as comedy.

Besides his wife (Chieko Baisho), two children and all their possessions, Kazami (Hisashi Ogawa) has brought along his aged father (the great Ozu star Chishu Ryu, in a wonderful portrayal of a humble rural man, as uninhibited in his expression of joy as he is reticent in displaying sorrow).

We soon realize that the Kazamis are every bit as much pioneers as the settlers who crossed the American West in covered wagons.

Indeed, seeing overcrowded cities and endless industrial vistas through their unsophisticated eyes is at times profoundly disconcerting. Nature is so totally absent, yet this man-made world is so constantly fraught with peril and sublime indifference for this small family.

At the film’s crux is the growth of the husband--a rather impetuous, stubborn fellow--to full, responsible manhood. “Where Spring Comes Late” is one of Yamada’s finest instances of discovering the extraordinary in the seemingly ordinary and of eliciting impeccable ensemble playing from his cast.

Like “The Yellow Handkerchief” and “Where Spring Comes Late,” “A Distant Cry From Spring” is set in Yamada’s beloved, rugged Hokkaido and glories in its change of seasons, representing nature’s eternal cycles. It’s a classic teaming of frequent Yamada co-stars, the ever-demure Baisho and the ever-stoic and virile Takakura.

Baisho is a young widow with a small child struggling to run a cattle ranch, and Takakura is the strong, capable stranger with an aura of mystery who comes out of nowhere to sign on as a hired hand.

“A Distant Cry” is drawn-out and anticlimactic and the comic relief heavy-handed (typical Yamada characteristics), but the shy reserve of these two people, so beautifully played by Baisho and Takakura, gives their inevitable, slow-developing love for each other terrific impact.

For ticket information about the LACMA Yamada series: (213) 857-6010. AFI Film Fest: (213) 856-7707. Little Tokyo Cinema: (213) 687-7077.