Nobuhiko Ōbayashi's Beijing Watermelon is a remarkable piece of cinema that manages to craft such a wonderfully tender humanist drama ripe with subtext while managing to never divulge into sentimental drivel, despite a subject matter begging for it. A relatively radical departure from Ōbayashi typical formal panache, Beijing Watermelon is based on real-life events that took place in Tokyo between the patriarch of a family-owned Japanese grocer and a group of Chinese-exchange students, who largely through chance formed a unique and lasting friendship. The trials and tribulations of this fragile relationship - one which is coerced and influenced by transnational inequities and cultural divides - is beautifully rendered by Ōbayashi, who shows a different side of formal rigor, navigating the complexities of human relationships and how they converge and constrict around social-political-economical constructs such as family, nationality, and class, while never losing focus of the intimate core of his story between a few individuals who largely through happenstance form meaningful relationships. There is an ethereal quality to how Ōbayashi navigates this story, as he manages to effectively detail altruistic principles through cinematic means in which day-to-day living and common spaces illustrate our shared existence, despite fabrications such as nation-states. Divisions themselves are cultivated through material conditions, and the way Beijing Watermelon subtly captures this strict social dichotomy between Japan and China, despite their spatial proximity, is one of the more interesting subtexts of the film. In the end, what perhaps makes Nobuhiko Ōbayashi's Beijing Watermelon so revelatory, and arguably my favorite film in his oeuvre, is how it encompasses the great filmmaker's long-running beliefs through a formalism that is far more restrained than many are accustomed to. For Ōbayashi, the importance of cinema is so important due to how it is merely a reflection of life itself. From Beijing Watermelon's meta-turn near its denouement to the film's understated social drama that engulfs most of its running time, Beijing Watermelon reminds viewers that life itself is of the utmost importance, and the grandeur and wonder of life often right in front of us, we just simply have to have the right perspective to truly live a good life.
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AuthorLove of all things cinema brought me here. Archives
June 2023
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