Competition
Dir. Kaneto Shindo

Kaneto Shindo is the holder of the absolute record in the history of the Moscow Film Festival. He is the only one who took he main trophy three times: in 1961 (“The Naked Island”), in 1971 (“Live Today, Die Tomorrow”) and 1999 (“Will to Live”). On the 28th of April he turned 99 and all the younger competitors (especially the young ones!) should learn from him something about the thoughtful and unique mis-en-scene in every shot, the ability to foresee the end result when all these dissimilar episodes are brought together to make an organic whole. About the incredible precision in the timing of the narration which makes it possible to teach the student the art of scriptwriting, taking just this movie as an example. About that knowledge, lost even in Hollywood, of how to make a film larger than life without making it stylized or old-fashioned. In short, if the Golden George chooses him for a fourth time, it would only be justified.

The action begins in 1944 in the Tenrikyo Headquarters, where a hundred sailors toiled for a month to turn a sheer fleabag into a military base and a marine transfer point. Now they are getting further assignments by lots drawn by their commanders. Most of them will sail to conquer the Philippines, only a handful will be sent to reequip the Takarazuki theatre into another military base. Among the majority are a lard bucket, a candy hound and a funny performer of love songs Sazuo Morikawa. On the eve of the departure he leaves a note with his friend Keita, assigned to Takarazuka. It is a short postcard from his wife saying: “Today is the day of the carnival, but it is so empty without you”. He asks Keita to take it to his wife if he dies, which he surely will.

Why Keita will appear on the Morikawa widow’s doorstep only after 5 years and one hour of screen time later you will learn after watching the film, but the amount of events, happening during this period, will be enough to fill three series. There will be solemn scenes of seeing the soldiers off to the front to the pioneer-like spirited marches composed by Yukio Naguchi, and the placement of the urns of those who died in battle, reminding one of the marionettes theatre. There will be the hilarious episode of the instant death of a heart attack, the laconic style of which arouses memories of the silent cinema of the 1910s, and the hear-rending vision of sleepy sailors whose faces fade in the pre-dawn darkness of non-existence after the roll-call like lanterns in the night. There will be the Bollywood interlude in a striptease bar, the black-and-white chronicle of Hiroshima and the waves of such an emerald color which for some reason you can get only on Fuji Film. And only then the encounter of the man and the woman will take place. And the film, which is sadly enough always relevant, telling us that every soldier with his lot and number is some one’s dearest candy-hound, hulk and loud-mouth and is very much needed there.
Like all great cinema, “Postcard” is a one hundred per cent actors’ film.

Most surely, Shindo uses everything at the director’s disposal to support his actors: shows a close-up of the man’s face so that we could feel ill-at-ease because of the hysterics of the woman, left in the depth of the set, through the silence and the downcast gaze of the man, who is listening to her. Or wraps the head of the village elder in a kerchief like an old granny so that we could enjoy the comic situation when the man is caught eavesdropping. And when it comes to the men’s rough-and-tumble before the eyes of the thrilled widow, the showcase of judo, karate and boxing techniques will be presented in the rays of the vigorous sun over their heads.

Etsushi Toyokawa playing Keita deserves a special compliment: no one since Tatsuya Nakadai managed to move so graciously and look so stunningly good in yukata. After this hypnotic performance the question why the unforgettable role of the one who “lived daringly and died daringly”, played by Nakadai in Kurosawa’s “Tsubaki Sanjuro” half a century ago, was given to Toyokawa in the recent remake will be answered once and for all.

Alexey Vasiliev