Japanese Girls at the Harbor

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william d Nice little drama and stylistically (i.e. the direction and cinematography) it's excellent. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member It's a visually beautiful film. The editing can be somewhat frustrating at times. The shot switches between two locations repetitiously. This can be forgiven considering the year it was made. Great dialogue considering it's a silent film. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 01/13/23 Full Review dustin d Japanese Girls at the Harbor is a latter-day silent film that exemplifies the medium and the period, demonstrating the late silent films were better than the early sound films. (In some ways, silent films are a different art form than sound films.) It is a story of a young woman's downfall and redemption after a man comes between her and her best friend. I thought the story might have worked better if the two main characters, Sunako and Dora, were males instead of females, since it is more common for a female to come between a male friendship than vice versa, and men are more likely to lash out violently. But you can accept what happens in the movie. The movie did a great job on the character design of Sunako. At the beginning she is a virginal Japanese school girl and is beautiful in a traditional Japanese sense. After she is spurned by her male love interest, Henry, she shoots at his new lover, Yoko, then goes on the lam. She becomes a prostitute, and has a hanger-on, and artist named Miura whom she uses and despises. After her transformation, she has a nasty look and is barely recognizable as the girl from the beginning of the movie. The Miura character was also complicated and realistic. He is the stereotypical "nice guy." He is obsessed with Sunako, paints her portraits constantly, and worships her. He lives with her and washes her clothes. He walks with a slouch and in one scene he is seen wearing an apron. Her treatment of him is vile, but she can't really be blamed for not respecting him. The movie has a couple plot holes, such as when Miura shows up at Dora and Henry's house to narc on Henry for seeing Sunako. There was no scene establishing he knew who Dora was or where she lived. It would have been simple to have a scene showing Miura stalking Henry, which would have been realistic and intriguing in the context of the film. When Yoko is on her deathbed, there was never a scene establishing she was sick. We could have seen her earlier coughing up blood or something visual like that. The movie beautifully brings to life an era in Japan when the country was rapidly modernizing and becoming more cosmopolitan, right on the eve of a war that would ravage the country. Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Audience Member Gorgeous cinematography and editing; quite leaden script. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 02/20/23 Full Review Audience Member Shimizu's tribute to the American movies, one of his last silent films is unusually filled with action and melodrama, mixing styles of current American Gangster sound movies, and Japanese drama. It did seem a little uneven and a bit bizarre in execution, but it was an interesting experiment nonetheless, especially with the cutting method used in the murder scene in the church. Yeah, that's something you don't see in many 1930's Japanese movies....! Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/18/23 Full Review Audience Member On decouvre malheureusement au fil des minutes que ce film bien realise n'est qu'un melodrame. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 01/13/23 Full Review Read all reviews

Japanese Girls at the Harbor

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