Last Updated on September 26, 2020 by rob
University student Tetsuro (Go Kato) falls in love with waitress Shino (Komaki Kurahara) but as the pair fall in love each is burdened with family tragedies that threaten to tear them apart.
This deeply moving film from director Kei Kumai is a contemporary social issue drama about that distinctively Japanese sense of personal shame which leads individuals to believe they are fated to be unhappy, even to the point of taking their own lives, and how the liberating quality of love enables them to transcend their misery. And you’d better believe poor Tetsuro has every reason to be depressed. The poor lad’s lost lost two sisters and two brothers to criminality and suicide while Shino, who bears the stigma of having grown up up in a red light district, is being forced into a loveless marriage against her will. On their first date Tetsuro and Shino visit their old hometown, there are reminiscences and via flashbacks family secrets begin to emerge.
Tetsuro sees everything, as it were, ‘through a glass darkly’ while Shino, despite her own problems, loves life. It’s her optimism which gives Tetsuro the strength to keep going. He in turn embodies the decency and goodness missing from Shino’s unhappy past. Kumai directs with real empathy for these characters, the storytelling rhythms are long and languorous, the film is full of local colour – all these little student bars and old streets in which their romance is conducted – and the film is all about capturing the ebb and flow of heartfelt emotions between two would be lovers as they struggle to break through the repressive social and cultural conventions of Japanese society, the ‘Long Darkness’ of the title.
When the pair visit Tetsuro’s family for their wedding up in snow country their love proves so affecting that it dispels even Mum and Dad’s gloom. There’s a lovely moment here where the father is so overcome with happiness that the family, fearing a heart attack, rush to calm him down! That night Tetsuro and Shino make love for the first time and Kumai emphasises the jingling bells of a passing horse-driven sleigh as the radiant couple look on. It’s a transcendent, celebratory moment, beautifully conceived by the director. In the last scene an old lady affectionately ribs the couple for their love and tells them ‘Everybody’s jealous of you!’ You can understand why in this very fine, sensitively directed, well played and heartfelt film.
