Please update your browser
Your current browser version is outdated. We recommend updating to the latest version for an improved and secure browsing experience.
Takemitsu and Masahiro Shinoda
Double Suicide (1969)
In many ways, Double Suicide is a very faithful adaptation of the source play (Shinjūten no Amijima, The Love Suicides at Amijima,1721) by Chikamatsu Monzaemon (1653-1724), the most famous of all Japanese playwrights and a figure who director Masahiro Shinoda (1932-) studied extensively as a theater major at Waseda University [1]. With the notable exception of two added scenes between the married paper merchant Jihei and the young courtesan Koharu, it follows the plot of Chikamatsu’s play very closely, and the traditional conflict between giri (social obligation) and ninjō (human feeling) is still the dramatic lynchpin of the narrative. Through the complex relationship between Tōru Takemitsu’s score and Shinoda’s mise-en-scène, however, Double Suicide becomes both deeply modern and uniquely cinematic.
The coupling of extremely flat compositions with Shinoda’s decision to keep objects and characters close together in the foreground makes the interior spaces that occupy most of the narrative feel oppressively claustrophobic. This impression is further reinforced by the omnipresence of lattice-like architectural structures (such as roof tiles, vertical bars, or a geometric matrix of bricks), which serve as powerful visual representations of imprisonment and constraint. As a result, the highly theatrical emotional histrionics of the actors, especially that of the male lead, attain a resonance that more conventional cinematic realism would have belied.
Like a traditional bunraku puppet play, Shinoda includes black-clad kuroko figures who repeatedly intervene to ensure that the protagonists continue along the proscribed course to their inevitable end, and they repeatedly push through the interior walls, transforming seemingly contiguous spaces into visual metaphors for the character’s emotions. Appropriately, Takemitu’s music combines structurally recurrent elements like percussion, a water motif, traditional instruments like a shamisen and a biwa, conventional bunraku chanting, and dissonant orchestration.
Drumming, Water, and Gongs
In the opening scene of the main body of the film, Takemitsu interweaves the three major musical motifs - the drumming on the bridge transitions to the sounds of running water and finally to the resonating gongs - just as the major visual locations and patterns of motion are introduced. The presence of the kuroko figures reinforces the sense of cyclical inevitability.
Variations of these different motifs (the percussive sounds and the resonating gong are isolated and brought in elsewhere in the film, as the two extracts below demonstrate.
Bunraku Chanting
At multiple points, Takemitsu also incorporates the Japanese shamisen and the narration that would conventionally accompany a bunraku puppet performance of a play like The Love Suicides at Amijima.
In the extract below, the motifs in Takemitsu's score are seamlessly connected with recurring visual motifs (such as the bridge) and also with the elements of traditional performance (such as the black-clad figure walking at the beginning and the other one reciting lines of the plays narration), blurring the boundaries between the different levels of the film. The impact of sound in this section is strengthened by the passages of silence.
Structures of Fate
All of these elements come together in a marvelous scene late in the film.
As dissolute Jihei cries out in despair, a group of kuroko, as if on cue, gather around him, and remove his outer garment. In slow motion and accompanied by hauntingly dissonant Takemitsu music, Jihei throws the piles of paper that constitute his livelihood into the air and wreaks havoc on his surroundings. In the process, he knocks down the wall of the cinematic stage, which is replaced by the blood-drenched wall of a brothel. A group of kuroko in the foreground move props around, as another group helps Jihei through the rear rotating wall which turns back into a mirror that then dissolves into water, the classic representation of ninjō in traditional Japanese theater.
As the camera ascends, it becomes clear that this is the Amijima river and, on the bridge above, the lead kuroko can be seen staring distantly down below at the spot where the lovers will ultimately meet their doom.
-
Ryūsuke Hamaguchi
