I am through with you!

The Makioka Sisters

I have recently been forced to revamp my website and write a research statement for it. Woe is me. It was so incredibly hard, oh my goodness. Having some serious experience on technical writing now, I think that have also changed my opinion on it. I now think that sentences should be short, every sentence should only convey one idea and finally, all sentences should be connected somehow. This is practically impossible to do, and even if one succeeds it still wouldn’t make good writing necessarily. What I truly need is something like talent.

“The Makioka Sisters” is an incredible dramafest. While the book describes things very, very subtly, the film practically changes everything. Teinosuke is in love with Yukiko (oh. my. God.), Tsuruko and Tatsuo appear on screen a lot and are given not just a cute relationship but even character development, and finally Taeko is an incredible bitch, perhaps even more so than Tsuruko appears to be. Oh yeah, I forgot Sachiko – well, she appears much less beautiful than the book leads you to believe, and much less kind and cheerful as well. Except for Yukiko, every female characters burst into laughter or crying at some point in the film, and they do so very dramatically.

From today’s perspective, it is also a little odd to see how incredibly 80’s the film looks like, a problem with almost every period film. A 2000’s film set in France in the Ancien Régime will always also have a 2000’s look, and similarly the color choices and especially the moustache of Yukiko’s last suitor look amazingly 80’s. Style-wise the film is acceptable and rather beautiful in its own way but for the most part I thought the directing was rather average. This is not a movie you watch because of its looks, sadly.

As a result, it is important to distance yourself from the book if you read it before, and only then it is really possible to enjoy the film. Nevertheless, my love for the book is the only reason why I saw the film in the first place, and I am not convinced that the film can stand on its own, despite the enjoyment I personally got from it.