The Framed 1’s Life

July 28, 2007. I just came home from a FREE Japanese Film
showing (Japanese cultural week apparently, and it wasn’t communicated properly
to us. I would’ve watched ALL the damn flicks)

The Sunday showing only had two movies lined up — Hotel Hibiscus and Inoichi.
Hotel Hibiscus was a very light-hearted comedy fiction about a family’s life in
suburban

Okinawa

, settled close to an American
military installment. The main character, Meiko, was an annoying little girl
with a tactless mouth, high spirits and childish charm. The entire movie
basically took snapshots of her family’s mundane life in a different light,
painting into it a light colored palette onto their otherwise everyday
drudgery.

The other movie, Inoichi, was a rather dark film bordering around tragedy and
hope and tackling the existential question, "what’s my reason for
living?" The main character’s Miri, a writer and single mother, and her
ex-boyfriend, Hiroishi, a film director that was diagnosed with cancer.

The first film was quite good, but the 2nd film, Inoichi, was striking – Ariel
Llanto, a good friend of mine, passed away because of cancer. Inoichi basically
centered on the lives of two people struggling to justify their existence, the
main tension in the tale wasn’t about death but life.

In one scene Miri’s mother visited her and, when Miri broke
the news of her pregnancy and how she’ll deal with being a single mother,
Miri’s mother rejoiced. She was yelling "Banzai, banzai! (hooray,
hooray!)," for Miri finally found a reason to live; after all, she added, mothers
always live.

On another scene, when Miri’s sister was able to snag the signature of the
father for some documents, she angrily gave the documents to Miri, asking her
"why do you want to bring more unhappy people into the world?"

What dark glasses the writer must’ve worn to see the world.

However, as the story progressed, Miri’s child was finally born and both
characters’ lives significantly changed. Hiroishi found his meaning as a father
and hopelessly attempted to look for a cure for his cancer; Miri, on the other
hand, became lighter and happier and took care of Hiroishi with vigor.

In the end, their efforts weren’t at all futile – Hiroishi was
able to meet Miri’s newborn son, even claiming to be the first “stranger” to
have met the baby even before its own mother – and Miri found her answers at
the expense of her tragic journey. At the end of the flick, when Hiroishi
passed away, Miri told herself that, “…A woman never dies when she has a child."

Also of note in the film was Miri’s mother’s quote that, “A
husband and a wife living under one roof are still strangers until a child is
born to them. It is that child that shall bond their lives into one."

I may have lapsed on some things, notably the name and the quotes (yes, these
are but approximations on what the characters said; I can’t memorize everything
verbatim), but that’s pretty much the essence of what they were talking about. Overall,
both movies were quite moving and definitely worth my 2 hours.