The Life of Chikuzan (1977)
A 1977 Japanese biographical film directed by Kaneto Shindo based on the life of shamisen player Takahashi Chikuzan.
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Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.
Just intense enough to provide a much-needed diversion, just lightweight enough to make you forget about it soon after it’s over. It’s not exactly “good,” per se, but it does what it sets out to do in terms of putting us on edge, which makes it … successful?
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
A musical biopic of the blind shamisen (a Japanese string instrument) player Chikuzan Takahashi. Narratively, it's pretty standard - one might call it the Japanese Ray and not be too far off. But it's well acted and well shot, with a lot of interesting settings and period detail (the setting is early 20th Century rural Japan, up to WWII). Ryuzo Hayashi stars as Chikuzan. Kaneto Shindo's wife and frequent star Nobuko Otowa co-stars as Chikuzan's mother. Well worth checking out if you can find it. This was nominated for the Japanese Academy award for Best Picture in the first year of its existence, but lost to Yoji Yamada's The Yellow Handkerchief.