Deciduous Tree; aka, The Tree Without Leaves (1986) begins with a surreal dreamworld carosel ride of men, women, & a child, attended by the opening credits before the film proper opens on a day of heavy snowfall.

Considering the phantasmagoric beginning, it's a realistic between-the-wars rural drama, but with just enough touch of strangeness to justify it's first salvo of surrealism.

The avowedly autobiographical film is based on director Kaneto Shindo's own mother. He casts his own companion Nobuki Otawa (best known from Shindo's horror film Onibaba) in the important role of Mother.

An old man (Heiji Kobayashi, pretty much playing Kaneto's alter ego) on a path through the snowy woods is headed to his isolated cottage. He begins thinking of his life & in flashbacks to his childhood we see scenes of peasant life, making rice cakes, a lion dance, rice farming, with particular focus on Haru's bond with his mother.

She bore Haru when she was forty-one, & never wanted to stop nursing him. It's hard to tell just how unnatural their relationship is, until in one scene mother kisses her son's willy. Even then the film doesn't want to judge too harshly, but clearly the boy grew up to be a bit squirrelly, admitting that if his mother were alive, he'd even now want to suckle at her sagging wrinkled breasts.

He came to be known as his mother's "favorite hanger-on" & followed her everywhere. His older brother was a member of the infantry stationed at nearby hiroshima. It was possible occasionally to walk over the hill to bring himn lunch on the base.

Kaji Meiko, so well known from the two Lady Snowblood action films, has a small role as a woman who visits the mountain retreat in Hatsu's "presence." It's nice to see her in a subdued & serious artfilm, but it's unfortunate she's in the story so briefly, & her role not entirely integral to the tale.

She's been the aging author's mistress but now he is very aloof & committed to his own loneliness. From his conversation with her, we know he's writing his novel only so that his mother having existed will have a place of preservation, so other will know of the woman who informed his entire life, the good things & the bad.

Now & then the adult Haru appears in the flashbacks as an unseen observer of his own memories, carrying through the surrealist touch from the opening credits-sequence. We learn that his family became bankrupt, their ancestral farmland sold, & life was difficult thereafter.

The father (Ichiro Zaitsu) was a strange, emotionally absent man incapable of taking care of the family, so it was all upon the mother's shoulders. As difficulty descends into outright destitution, even their splendid traditional home must be sold, & the central image of the film becomes the careful dismantling of the beautiful building, carted off to be put back together in some far away location.

When all is lost but a small plot of land & their old storage-house that became their pathetic little home, mother finally sickens & dies, while their passive father continues incapable of anything.

It's a poetic film of painful nostalgia, much of its tension created by things lost to time & to history that must forever be lamented, most especially a mother who left indelible marks upon his soul, some of these marks faintly perverse & tragic, others heroic & saintly from such nurturance as can never again be experienced.

copyright © by Paghat the Ratgirl