‘Beijing Watermelon’ a Slice of Real Life

If the Little Tokyo Cinemas, which close Nov. 1, have to go, at least they’re doing so in style, with Nobuhiko Obayashi’s quirky, original and unpredictable “Beijing Watermelon,” which opens in Cinema I today as the theater’s final first-run attraction. Meanwhile, in Cinema II a revival of the gangster movie “Onimasa” with Tatsuya Nakadai also starts today as first of five major vintage Japanese films from film historian/distributor Audie Bock’s East/West Classics collection.

“Beijing Watermelon” seems to be eavesdropping on life as it focuses on a green-grocer (Bengal) and his family, who live behind their store in a pleasant city not far from Tokyo. The film brims over with the enviable pleasures of a bustling, noisy communal existence, a sense of extended family, in which a long day’s work is topped with a few rounds at the neighborhood bar.

A bit of intimate Old Japan has survived in the face of impersonal skyscrapers and supermarkets. Into this tightly knit, thoroughly homogenous world comes a Chinese student (Wu Yue) who cannot afford the grocer’s produce. “That’s they way it is,” the grocer shrugs, but very quickly this kindly man has substituted his obsession with playing the horses with easing the economic hardships of a succession of Chinese students.

Obayashi’s various writers, working from an actual incident, have provided him with material rich in possibilities that would unexpectedly take on a whole new meaning with Tian An Men Square. We’re pleasantly lulled into thinking we’re watching a variation on a sentimental “Tora-san” when gradually the grocer commences to endanger his business, his marriage and finally his health with his compulsive generosity to the Chinese. We’re being made uncomfortably aware of the need to consider the limits of friendship and goodwill and their consequences when very shortly thereafter the film abruptly evolves into one of the most surprising and powerful evocations of the implications of the Tian An Men Square Massacre.

Obayashi’s warmth and populist sentiment’s bring to mind the films of Frank Capra. Bengal and Masako Motai, who plays the grocer’s sturdy, long-suffering wife, are terrific. “Beijing Watermelon” (Times-rated Family), a treasure of wry, telling observations, is an eloquent commentary on the magic of the cinema itself.