MIRROR OF THE BRIDE

In the conversations with his uncles and aunts, the filmmaker obliquely sketches a portrait of his grandmother, who is living out her final days in a nursing home near Kyoto. As a pragmatist, her son explains that she has specific health problems and was unhappy in her widowhood. Little by little, his sisters recall their own childhoods, as if compelled to keep the memories of their mother’s harsh character alive in order to exorcise their own guilt. Gradually, thanks to the intimate and free-floating listening, their words take on an underlying hardness and an individualistic discourse banishes the initial caring words. “For the first time, I love my life!” spurts out the eldest, who had for a time taken her elderly mother under her roof. The film’s construction in concentric circles that converge on the mother’s words soon pinpoints the origin of her harshness: a gruelling past laden with her husband’s monumental debts, bankruptcies and conflicts with the yakuzas. “I see you! I have found the source of love”, sings the old woman when she is hauled out of the home to attend a wedding. Lucid and delicate, Mirror of the Bride reveals the emotions silently transmitted from mother to daughter, a mixture of symbiotic love and filial duty. (Charlotte Garson)