Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Memories of Matsuko
2006 · Tetsuya Nakashima · Memories of Matsuko on Sightlines
A CGI bluebird settles beside a woman on the worst day of her life, and the flowers behind her come up the color of a candy wrapper.
Most viewers back out right there. Memories of Matsuko looks like a commercial. It is one: Tetsuya Nakashima came to features from advertising, and he lights a ruined life with the gear you'd use to sell a soft drink. Stay with the discomfort and the film pays it back with interest. The frosting isn't a lapse of taste. It's the truest thing on screen, and the whole movie turns on the question of whose frosting it is.
Begin with the quietest part, because it sets the rules. Sho, a young man with nothing much going on, gets handed his dead aunt's apartment to clear out. It's a dump. Decades of a life in bags. He can't help Matsuko; she was dead before the first frame. All he can do is look at what's left and try to build a person out of it. Deleuze gave this figure a name: the voyant, the seer. A character who has stopped being able to act and can only watch and register. Classical movies run on a simple circuit: you see a situation, you do something about it, the situation changes. Sho's circuit is cut before it starts. He sees; nothing follows. Everything in this film has already happened.
So what comes back should be memory. Deleuze's word for the ordinary flashback is the recollection-image: a dated slice of a former present, retrieved more or less intact. Matsuko's flashbacks start that way and then detonate. Hyper-color grading, choreography, birds, whole fields. Sho wasn't there for any of it. He has objects and secondhand stories, and out of that thin material the film builds production numbers. This is what Deleuze called a crystalline description: an image that composes its own object, then quietly replaces it. The musical number doesn't illustrate the squalor. It eats it.
Which gets us to the concept the film lives inside. Deleuze's crystal-image is a moment where the actual thing and its virtual double (memory, dream, reflection) spin so close together that you can't tell them apart. Not a flashback with a frame around it. A short circuit. In Matsuko the circuit runs between a woman being degraded and the same woman singing in a meadow, and the film flatly refuses to rank them.
Here is why that matters, and why it isn't just a fancy word for "stylized." If you read the pastel as Nakashima decorating someone else's suffering, the film is obscene. Read it as a crystal and it becomes something else: the fantasy is Matsuko's, and it is load-bearing. She performs happiness because she cannot secure it. Nakashima's specific invention is to hand a character's coping mechanism to the camera department and let it run the movie. The style isn't about her. It is her.
Deleuze wrote beautifully about musicals, and about one thing in particular. In a great number the dancer doesn't move through the world; the world's movement passes into the dancer. He called it the movement of world. Astaire takes a step and a whole town's rhythm takes him over. Watch what Nakashima does with that. Matsuko stands in a field and the field dances. Flowers, light, birds, extras, all of it in motion around a woman who is nearly still. In a Demy or a Donen picture that's ecstasy. Here it diagrams a life that happens to somebody. Schoolteacher, lounge hostess, one wrong man, another wrong man. The happiest formal device the genre owns, repurposed to show a person who never once steers.
Underneath the color there's a harder shape, one Deleuze took from literary naturalism: the line of slope. Appetite and compulsion cut an irreversible downward path and the character rides it to exhaustion. Matsuko's whole résumé is that line, ending in the apartment Sho is emptying. The cruelty of the film, and the reason it's funny well before it's devastating, is that Nakashima scores the descent like a hit single. Every rung down gets a brighter arrangement.
And through all of it, the face. As a girl, Matsuko pulls a grotesque funny-face to make her father look at her. She goes on pulling it for thirty years, at men who won't. Deleuze, borrowing from Brecht, called this a gest: a posture that lays bare the entire social relation it belongs to. Repetition is what turns it into one. The first time it's a kid's gag. By the last it isn't a face at all, it's the complete terms on which this woman was ever offered affection. Miki Nakatani carries it across three decades of aging and wear without ever letting it go slack.
None of this comes from nowhere. Dancer in the Dark is the working template: a doomed woman's degradation broken open by numbers that are explicitly her defense against it, and Matsuko quotes that structure outright. The palette is Demy's, from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, where a serial tragedy of wrong loves is color-coordinated into a storybook that declines to look sad, and from The Young Girls of Rochefort, whose sunlit town-square choreography is the direct sourcebook for the flower-field interludes. The delivery system is Amélie: digital hyper-color, CGI whimsy, a life narrated briskly out of anecdotal fragments. Nakashima takes that advertising-slick biography mode wholesale and drops a catastrophe into it. From Moulin Rouge! he takes the karaoke logic, familiar pop recycled as emotional shorthand over cutting that never rests. Behind all of them sits All That Jazz, which first proved a self-destructive life could be staged as a song cycle and finished with death as a showstopper.
What Matsuko adds to that conversation is the nerve to hold the register the whole way, with no wink and no apology, and then make the final movement land anyway. A reconstruction film normally promises fidelity: here are the facts of a life, assembled for you. This one admits from the first minute that it's inventing, that the images are a nephew's guesses wearing his aunt's dreams, and it gets nearer to her that way than an honest accounting could. That's why it stands as the touchstone of 2000s Japanese cinema's maximalist wing. It showed that tonal dissonance can be a method rather than a mistake, and that a film's surface can be a character's psychology instead of a director's taste.
Rewatch it with one question. Every time the flowers come up, ask who is making them bloom. Sho, trying to give his aunt a better story than the one in the trash bags? Or Matsuko, who trained herself to see it that way because the alternative was unbearable? The film never says. That refusal is the crystal. It's also the most generous thing I've seen a movie do for a character it can't save.
Concepts in play
- crystal-image (hyalosign) — Flashbacks in which Matsuko's degradation and her musical fantasy of it become impossible to sort apart — the 'frosting-thick style' is her own coping mechanism made visible, so the image belongs equally to fact and to defense.
- movement of world — The fields-of-flowers dance interludes: the world (flowers in digital hyper-color, CGI bluebirds, choreographed extras) carries the motion while Matsuko stands near-still at its center.
- crystalline-description — Musical production numbers staged over 'scenes of genuine devastation' — the number composes its object and then replaces it, so the squalor Sho is literally standing in vanishes into the number describing it.
- the gest — The childhood funny-face pulled to win her father's attention, repeated for thirty years at men who won't look, accruing 'almost unbearable weight through repetition' — a posture that exposes the entire relation it belongs to.
- line of slope (entropy / degradation) — Schoolteacher → lounge hostess → lover of the wrong men, over and over, ending in a squalid apartment being emptied into bags: an irreversible descent, scored with brighter and brighter pop.
- the seer (voyant) — Sho, a young slacker, combing through his dead aunt's belongings — he can perceive and assemble but can change nothing; Matsuko is dead before the film opens.
- recollection-image (mnemosign) — The film's stated architecture — decades of Matsuko's life 'pieced together' as dated flashbacks — which the film then corrupts by staging those recollections as production numbers Sho could not possibly have witnessed.
- affective colour — Flowers blooming in digital hyper-color and the candy-saturated, color-coordinated palette inherited from The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, where colour absorbs the scene and dictates its feeling rather than describing a place.