Ooshikamura soudouki

I watched this a decade ago, when it first came out, and had the chance to re-watch it tonight. I'm glad I did.

I watched it in Japanese, and I don't know if decent subtitles for this movie exist; in any case it would be difficult for a Westerner to follow the story in all its details, insofar as it is intricately related to Kabuki and other aspects of traditional Japanese culture. But if you love the theater, and especially home-grown theater--plays put on by locals--and the concomitant camaraderie and intrigues, you might want to take a close look at this one.

In its relation to theater, Ooshikamura most closely parallels "A Midwinter's Tale", aka "In the Bleak Midwinter", Kenneth Branagh's tale of down-and-out actors putting on a Christmas performance of Hamlet. As in that film, there is no shortage of humorous asides and subplots, here most prominently involving two aging actors who suddenly show up during a rehearsal for the approaching traditional kabuki extravaganza. This poses a problem, because one of the two is the wife of the lead actor, and the other is the man who persuaded her to elope with him some 18 years previously. An awkward situation, to be sure, and it gets worse from there, and also funnier, before turning dramatic-tragic.

To sum up, rather wonderful, if you can suspend your disbelief at the prospect of a woman with dementia somehow, over the course of less than a week, making a complete recovery, such that she can play the lead role in the troupe's grand production. Seemed somewhat improbable to me, but.