Buy I'd Rather Be a Shellfish

I'd Rather Be a Shellfish

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Synopsis

Katsuo Fukuzawa’s intimate epic about miscarried military justice is a poetic narrative with handsome cinematics, that honors a story that has become a beloved cultural and political touchstone in Japan.

Review

The title for this brilliant but troubling film from Japan’s Katsuo Fukuzawa is part of the heartbreaking coda spoken by its lead character, Toyomatsu (played with precise, silent-movie expressiveness by Masahiro Nakai), a struggling barber and young family man who is tragically railroaded on trumped-up war-crime charges near the end of WWII. The sturdy screenplay by Shinobu Hashimoto (a veteran of several Kurosawa titles) has classic contours, driven by Hashimoto’s poetic dialogue and narration, cinematographer Kosuke Matsushima’s shimmering images, and especially by Joe Hisaishi’s lilting score. The story arc neatly alternates between Toyomatsu and his wife Fusae (the lovely Yukie Nakama), and Fukuzawa’s staging of Toyomatsu’s initial meeting with Fusae following his imprisonment is as simple, stirring and memorable as the Fredric March-Myrna Loy reunion scene in Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). Based on a beloved Japanese teleplay from 1958, I’d Rather Be a Shellfish is something of an event, at once a humbling and powerful experience that bravely offers no promise of surcease. (English, Japanese with English subtitles)

-- Joe Baltake