Kanzashi

Hiroshi Shimizu's films have some sort of languishing energy that can be described as elegiac, mournful, or melancholic. This, as whimsical as it is, too cannot escape from such sorrow.

The story sets in a small inn where almost everyone wants to know everybody's private business. When Chishu Ryu hurt his foot accidentally (or rather poetically) by a stranger's ornamental hairpin, the rest of the inn dwellers expect a love story to happen immediately. Nonetheless, life is often not that predictable.

Eventually, every meeting ends with a bittersweet farewell. The problem is we never know when. To leave or to meet again lies on the palms of our hands, they say, but when a person is tied to their own fate, this kind of decision are deceptively simple because they can be hard to make. I suppose this is what most of us would call real life.