Love Under the Crucifix
This event is in the past
Sunday, August 7, 2022, 1:30 pm
The Beacon
Columbia City (Seattle)
This is an in-person event
$12.50
The following description comes from the event organizer.
Tanaka’s final film as a director is an immensely ambitious and formally audacious period piece (jidai-geki) and a superlative addition to the "amour fou" pantheon. Set in 16th-century Japan during the persecutions of Christians, LOVE UNDER THE CRUCIFIX mixes zen beauty with surreal set pieces amid burnished skies as it portrays the doomed love between Miss Ogin (Ineko Arima), the stunning and terrifically stubborn daughter of a tea master, and a pious, married samurai (Tatsuya Nakadai, on the cusp of major stardom) for whom she has been madly pining for years. Frequently frisson-inducing, the film powerfully conveys their barely suppressed desire as circumstances inevitably keep them apart. Rebellious to the core, Ogin rejects the role society expects her to play and is willing to undertake the ultimate sacrifice in order to honor her true yet forbidden love.With its chromatically heightened and sometimes strange compositions, its heart-tearing confessions, and Sirkian declarations, Tanaka’s swan song is an aptly dramatic ode to female fortitude in face of an unjust world. Though distributed by Shochiku, the film was produced independently by Ninjin Kurabu ("The Carrot Club"), a film company founded by the actresses Yoshiko Kuga, Keiko Kishi, and star Ineko Arima, who sought to enable better working conditions for actors within the studio system.