Yumeji

Seijun Suzuki's Yumeji (1991) is the last part of his Taisho trilogy, after Zigeunerweisen and Kagero-za. At its centre is a real name: the painter and poet Takehisa Yumeji. But this is not a biography; the film sends Yumeji on a journey, brings him to a woman whose husband has disappeared, and lets everything after that slide into dream. Kenji Sawada plays Yumeji as timid, eager and permanently ready to run. Suzuki's use of colour moves ahead of the narrative here: the lake, red, a white kimono, sets that change place between shots. Scenes connect by association rather than logic, and someone dead in one scene may be sitting at a table in the next. Not having seen the other two films is no obstacle, because what the trilogy shares is not a story but that Taisho atmosphere in which the dead and the living occupy the same room. It was made in 1991, more than twenty years after Suzuki was fired by Nikkatsu. Who it's for: viewers open to films that advance by image and let narrative dissolve. Who it's not for: viewers who want a plot they can follow; here even the question of who is alive is left deliberately open.