I've screencapped some of the other Somai blurays from Japan, and I can see that, as thethinwhiteduke says, Luminous Woman looks the best. Before posting those caps, though, I wanted to get my caps posted for Lost Chapter: Passion in Snow, just because it's maybe the least-known of Somai's movies, and might get a bit eclipsed by the wilder-looking Luminous Woman, with the better-looking bluray transfer. Lost Chapter came out in Somai's banner year, 1985, after Typhoon Club and Love Hotel. There's a two-year gap after that, presumably for filming Luminous Woman. Like a number of other Somai movies (Sailor Suit Schoolgirl with a Machine Gun, The Catch, this film, and Luminous Woman), it's written by Yozo Tanaka, member of Seijun Suzuki's Guryu Hachiro writing team and credited author on all of Suzuki's Taisho Trilogy (also the writer of a lot of Nikkatsu's Roman Porno films, including Wife to be Sacrificed). It's also an early film vehicle for pop singer and star of the Sukeban Deka TV show, Yuki Saito. She is an odd actress, not as ready-for-camera as Hiroko Yakushimaru in Sailor Suit Schoolgirl and The Terrible Couple, not as artistically successful at creating verisimilitude as the actresses in Typhoon Club. She seems very unaware of where the light is falling upon her, of where the camera is––yet at the same time a kind of self-consciousness in her frequently makes Somai's long takes feel unusually awkward. But she nevertheless succeeds in conveying a real depth of emotion––her specialty at the time is a sense of sincerity, in the face of the surreal situations that Sukeban Deka called for, and she uses that sincerity to real effect in this strange, raw murder-mystery/fairy-tale, about a Cinderella-like little girl named Natsuki, rescued from an abusive family by a young employee of their company and his friend. She's raised by this young company man, and she falls in love with him, though he is engaged to another woman. When her abusive stepsister invites her to just about the weirdest birthday party ever put to film, and she suddenly dies in the midst of her party (after an insane interpretive dance), Natsuki is drawn in as the main suspect of the crime.
I didn't much like this film when I first saw it. It begins with its most famous element, a 13-or-so-minute extended take, which binds up all of Natsuki's early life into a kind of surreal swirl of scenes filled with garishly fake snow. I wasn't very convinced by this when I first saw the film, and I thought the whole picture lacked a vividness I'd associate with Somai's most successful movies. As I've gotten older and watched the film a number of times, I've come to like it as much as any of Somai's best movies. It has an unusual emotional flavor to it, a kind of melancholy for an abandoned girl, with a black hole for a future (the film lives in a kind of suburban Japan with a touch of old-fashion-ness about it, in which we understand Natsuki's estrangement from her family as limiting her future opportunities), yearning for the attention of her ad-hoc guardian for love, but also desperately hurting for her improvised place in the world to be something a little less tenuous than it is. Right away, Natsuki has an idea of who the murderer is––either her adoptive father or his best friend––one of these guys would be her lover, another her protector, but it's hard to tell which would be which for a lot of the runtime. Thus pursuing the case means Natsuki may lose one of the two people closest to her––and yet, if she can't offer the police another suspect, they are busy fitting her for the rap. The central role of Natsuki is exceptionally good for Saito, who sometimes seems like a dreamer, drifting through an unending nightmare. I've come to find this melodrama of a potentially forgotten young girl very moving. The stylish Somai flourishes are kept to a pretty low ebb, but there are a few shots where Saito is mounted on a dolly, or oblivious to clowns trundling by on stilts, or riding in what seems to be an invisible plane––some of this is pure Somai style, but the clowns especially seem like a touch provided by Yozo Tanaka, if I had to guess. Natsuki appears to be thickly ensconced in a chauvinist world, but the film is enlivened with its resolute focus upon her. None of the things Natsuki does are treated as frivolous; her emotional needs are the backdrop from which the film springs, and the film always privileges her viewpoint on any given situation––making the film more an observation of a sexist milieu than a chauvinist film. Yuki Saito's earnest, vulnerable presence is the lynchpin by which any part of the film works––probably the ultra-long-take setup for the film is less impressive simply because it doesn't feature Saito herself––the scene immediately afterwards, where she is leaning backwards on the back of a motorbike, with a ridiculous garland of flowers, singing and shouting with joy to see Yuichi, her guardian returning is immediately charged with Saito's energy––the energy which sustains the rest of the picture.
Lost Chapter had spotty home-video representation. Between the VHS released in 1986 and the DVD/Bluray releases in 2021, there had been nothing, so far as I can see. So the bluray was a big step up in quality from the greymarket versions which were originally fansubbed. That said, the disc isn't great, and it isn't great in this infuriating way. The film clearly has some issue which is softening the grain and dulling the colors. But there's a trailer for the film on the disc as well, which doesn't have any of these deficiencies. The trailer has saturated color and the grain is much clearer. I'll share some comparisons here. Not all the shots will be direct comparisons, however––a lot of the footage in the trailer seems to come from alternate takes of the scenes, and in some cases entirely different versions of scenes, or scenes which don't appear in the final edit of the film. But in these cases, you'll see footage which was clearly shot at the same time, just at a slightly different angle, or something to that effect. I'll mention them when they come up:
Comparison:
Even just on the logo you can see considerable differences. There's sharper grain on the trailer, more saturate color, and we can see a little more image, as if the master on the full movie was zoomed in a little more. This will be constant throughout the movie. There's also a noticeable green bias on the full movie which is evident even in the logo. I think the fact that it appears in the logo suggests that it's part of the color of the transfer, rather than any kind of color-correction the filmmakers wanted for the movie. That, combined with the low-contrast palette makes the feature film look just a bit off on the disc, all the time.
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On my TV the difference between these different versions of the shot are quite pronounced. The depth-of-field on the trailer version is significantly enhanced by the added sharpness of the grain. The image looks alive with depth, and rich with color. On the full movie it looks washed-out and, worst of all, very flat. Looking at the two of these, I know the film wasn't meant to look like the full movie does on this disc, and it's maddening to think it could have looked at least like the trailer does.
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Here, a different take is used in the final film. In the trailer, the framing is further back, much more stable (the full film uses a shot which begins tracked and zoomed in on Natsuki's face, and then pulls back into the less-wide wide shot. We also never see the movement Saito is doing in the trailer in the finished film. But the differences between the trailer and the feature are still easy to see. The grain is softer on the feature, making the depth-of-field flatter and making it harder to visually separate objects. The color and contrast are lower-key on the feature, making the scene far less vivid. The green bias also flattens out the riotously vivid color of the flowers in Natsuki's garland. Of course, the feature and the trailer come from different transfers of different elements. But I think the trailer gives us a good idea of what more we could be getting from the film, had the transfer on the disc been handled better.
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The full film, as it appears on the disc, looks much better in closeup and much softer and more swimmy in wide shots––I guess this is, as thethinwhiteduke suggests about Tokyo Heaven, an older transfer of the film? The effect when watching the two different versions on my TV is that the trailer has much more pleasing depth-of-field and more real-seeming color than the full movie does. The disc has not turned out looking as good as the Tokyo Heaven disc does. But the trailer has, as you can see in this shot, pops and scratches on it––and the full movie doesn't. Of course, with the reduced sharpness, it would be harder to tell if they were there, anyway.
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Same scene in these caps, but taken from different angles. The scene as it plays in the final film is a single-take from this frontways angle, never cutting away to the closeup from the trailer.
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Here Somai has clearly shot the scene from one angle, and another 180 degrees opposite. In Tom Mes' commentary on the Third Window disc of Typhoon Club, he says Somai preferred to use versions of a scene with the best energy from the actors, and would put up with almost any visual imperfection in pursuit of good performances. Here, he sacrifices a beautiful scene of the sea for a shot with only a boathouse background.
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Just analyzing the differences between the trailer and the finished film provides a lot of insight into the kind of decisions Somai made on-set. The scene in the trailer with Natsuki and the detective sitting on the floor of a house is substituted in the final film for this much more unorthodox staging, where Natsuki walks down the road and the detective is waiting for her, sitting atop a fence. I would say the two scenes might have existed side-by-side in the script, with Somai cutting the one where the characters moved indoors, except that the scene as it exists in the finished picture feels extraordinarily complete, beginning with the characters meeting and ending with them departing one another's company.
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Again, Somai uses a different take from the one in the trailer. I tried to get as much of the same background, and of the same expression from the actor, but you can at least see how dull the full version of the film looks in comparison to the lively color and light visible in the trailer:
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Unfortunately, no direct comparison here, either, since Somai uses different takes of the scene, with different camera positions. Still, the brightness and sharpness of the trailer makes the full film look anemic:
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In the night shots, the trailer footage really shines, and the full movie wanes. Unfortunately, the movie has a preponderance of night shots:
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One of the film's signature scenes, with Natsuki walking a tightrope between the sidewalk and the curb. The take used in the trailer is from a lower angle, with more of the street background visible in the background. To my eyes, the depth-of-field in the full movie is flattened considerably with the softer grain:
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Here's an interesting one, where the trailer utilizes this beautiful–looking scene of the main characters in this hazy shower together (the film is full of this kind of imagery, of people deluged with water). This scene doesn't appear in the finished film, But I've included screenshots from the two scenes I think this one sat between. Natsuki gets released from the police station, then in the finished film is walking down these steps with her guardian. The scene from the trailer makes it seem like she's persuading her guardian that they should walk instead of taking a cab home––leading to the next scene, where they walk through a park in the pouring rain:
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These last two are just really pretty shots which appear in the trailer and that appear nowhere in the final film. The one of Natsuki looking at her reflection in the window I think must follow the scene where she gets on the train. I looked everywhere in the finished film for that closeup of Natsuki's guardian, Yuichi. Not only does it not appear, he never appears in the film wearing that costume. The film is very consistent about time sequence––you can follow the sequence by following the costume changes throughout. He just doesn't wear this ensemble, so I'm guessing this scene was entirely excised as well.
One last funny thing about the trailer: it closes with these end cards, advertising what I presume is a double-bill with Nobuhiko Obayashi's Four Sisters. These two pictures would make an interesting pairing: both pretty, both artfully-made, but otherwise they couldn't be more different from one another. Somai's picture feels subtle and sensitive next to the brickbat melodramatics of Four Sisters––all people dying of cancer and stuff. Very over-obvious by comparison, again underlining Somai's sophistication and his deft hand.
Next post I'll share a few more screencaps from the full movie, just because I think few people even here have seen the film.
