MOVIE REVIEW : Treacherousness of Nostalgia in ‘Buddies’

There’s such a warm, sentimental glow to the often playful “Buddies” (at the Little Tokyo Cinemas) that it’s easy to overlook its subtlety and complexity, both as a consideration of the sometimes thorny nature of friendship and beyond this, the treacherousness of nostalgia.

What’s more, if you were amused by Ken Takakura’s starchy cop loosening up in Ridley Scott’s “Black Rain,” you will enjoy even Takakura even more in one of the richest roles of his career. “Buddies” provides Takakura opportunities to shine like Paul Newman.

The place is Tokyo and the time is the spring of 1937, the last days of Old Japan before the honor of the nation is blackened by its imminent Rape of Nanking, a prelude to wartime madness. Throughout, director Yasuo Furuhata and his cinematographer, Daisaku Kimura, gives us enchantingly beautiful images of a leisurely Tokyo of tree-lined streets that today has been all but eradicated.

The emotional pull of the look of the picture, heightened by Tomuyuki Asakawa’s romantic score, is matched by the heart-tugging nature of its story. Takakura’s Kadokura is an industrialist looking forward to the transfer of his best friend Mizuta (Eiji Bando) back to Tokyo. Kadokura and Mizuta surely would never have become friends--or even have met--had they not become buddies in the army. Kadokura is handsome, virile and sophisticated, while Mizuta is a short moon-faced fellow, a sometimes oafish office worker of modest rank. Yet Mizuta, his unexpectedly beautiful and elegant wife Tami (Sumiko Fuji) and their teen-age daughter (Yasuko Tomita) are like family to Kadokura, who is caught up in a childless, loveless marriage to a woman (Nobuko Miyamoto, the “Taxing Woman” herself) who coats her martyr’s personality with saccharine.

Kadokura’s extravagant gestures to Mizuta bespeak of more than friendship, however, for Kadokura has an unspoken, unrequited love for the radiant Tami, a happy, contented woman. A traditional, devoted wife, she nevertheless manages to deal with Kadokura with ease. Clearly, she knows how Kadokura feels about her and, at some unacknowledged level, Mizuta himself senses his friend’s feelings for his wife. The signal accomplishment of Ichiko and writer Tsutomu Nakamura, in adapting Kuniko Mukoda’s novel, is to convey these emotional currents without spelling them out.

In the movies, Japanese pictures especially, unrequited love is usually the province of women rather than men, yet with powerful understatement Takakura expresses the anguish of the dignified Kadokura. Significantly, at the film’s climax, Kadokura takes a bold, decidedly daring stand, not in regard to himself but in behalf of Mizuta’s lovely daughter. Akin to Nora’s slamming the door in Ibsen’s “Doll’s House,” it reminds us that beneath a beguiling surface civility the Japan of the late ‘30s could be as rigid in its restraints upon personal happiness as it was in its pursuit of military aggression.