All eponymous women in Nobuteru Uchida's fifth feature film are broken. They are not just broken, they are either devastated, oppressed, depressed, hysterical or monstrous. They are gathered under the collective noun “women”, defined and described by a man.
There is a lot of pathos to deal with in this Moscow International Film Festival main competition drama: theft and betrayal, psychological terror, a grueling parent, suicide, arrest, bullying, the pouring rain – it's all there, set against the backdrop of the first Covid-19 outbreak in Japan, and to the melodramatic score composed by Kazune Tanaka. Instead of tissues, a cheese grater is required.
After failing to find a job upon graduating from the university of Tokyo, Misaki (Yukiko Shinohara) is stuck in her rural hometown with her handicapped mother Mitsuko (Atsuko Takahata). She endures a horrendous day-to-day abuse by the parent who maybe suffered a stroke which did impair her mobility, but not her vicious character. Mitsuko shows affection to anyone else but her daughter whom she mercilessly assaults verbally. In this grueling display of power (the good old “as long as you are under my roof” terror), Misaki's only bright moments are afternoons shared with her former school friend, the bee-keeper Kaori (Kana Kurashina), and visits by her fiance Naoki, mother's seemingly charming caretaker.
Everything starts going wrong when Naoki doesn't show up at work one day. He's gone with Misaki's savings given him as a loan to open a new business, and he is replaced by a Persian carer Merriam Tanaka (Sahel Rosa). One wrong decision will cut the extra chunk of the ground from under Misaki's feet. Within only one day, she is left without everything that kept her going. From that day on, her urge to compensate for the loss is big, and the interest in bees is awaken.
With its over-accentuated sentimentality and unconvincing script-writing, “The Women” is unlikely to click with a broader audience, or to have a wider international festival presence. Although the exact date of its release in Japan is not yet announced, it is supposed to be some time in spring this year.
The film fails as a character-study drama, mostly due to the overload of emotions and its inability to make Misaki's post-trauma caused interest in beekeeping credible, but equally so by presenting naive answers to big questions such as – how much of the evil can be forgotten after one moment of confession.
it’s not flawless indeed, a bit of overacting (which is more common with J-actors than with J-actresses…it kind of surprised me) and as you said emotional overload, yet, I liked it. I think there’s some early Kawase quality to it, because of the fixed shots of surrounding nature, because of those female bonds guys just don’t grasp more often than not, because etc…