Beijing Watermelon plays at the Trylon Cinema Friday, November 1st, through Sunday, November 3rd. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
In the dawning hours of the morning, a grocer (Bengal) wakes to the still-blue fading night. The framing is methodical, delicate, but not at all static. The grocer Haruzo’s body stirs from bed, but the camera lingers on his wife Michi (Masako Motai) stirring and rolling over in her sleep. The layered motion of the shot reveals itself slowly, but is our window into these characters’ lives before they’ve spoken a word.
The visual language of Beijing Watermelon is so deft and subtle that it might take some time for a viewer to register the effect that comes from director Nobuhiko Obayashi framing almost all the story in snapshots like these. Though the film traverses a period of six years, many of its shots and sequences unfold in single, carefully blocked takes involving up to a dozen actors. Some of these shots are quiet long takes that simply hold the camera in place for multiple minutes, for a naturalistic feel, as in the inciting janken (rock paper scissors) game between Haruzo and a Chinese exchange student who cannot afford his grocery’s prices. Others give only mere glimmers into a moment in Haruzo or Michi’s lives, sometimes no longer than ten seconds, before the film cuts ahead, the amount of time elapsed rarely made explicitly clear other than tip-offs to the viewer through dialogue.
For those entering Beijing Watermelon with only a passing familiarity with Obayashi through his most popular film—the cult classic House, more readily available on home media and more frequently screened than the rest of Obayashi’s undersung filmography—the steadiness and mundanity of much of the film’s affairs may come as a major subversion of expectations. But House is, itself, often undersold by its own viewership, its heightened expressions and embellished visual flourishes an externalization of how its adolescent protagonists are processing the nuclear traumas of postwar Japan. Obayashi’s strengths as a filmmaker rest in his versatility, his ability to scan a story’s marble for the most evocative way to carve out its shape.
In Beijing Watermelon’s case, the narrative of cultural exchange, marital dynamics, and cross-generational aspirations through sociopolitical tumult demands a style altogether different from Obayashi’s more visually dynamic fare, and he shrewdly presents the drama of the film as matter-of-factly as possible to complement the story. Like his work with monochromatic sequences in His Motorbike, Her Island or subtle lighting shifts in The Discarnates—and, yes, even the remarkable commitment to surrealistic hyper-expressionism with House—Obayashi’s work on Beijing Watermelon always displays his trademark empathetic grace, even if its style announces itself much less loudly than his flashier work. In this case, that empathetic grace is put in service toward an especially gentle, earnest, and kind mode of operation.
The real-life tale of a grocer offering his storefront and personhood to help Chinese exchange students, even amid his own financial struggles in doing so, needs not heighten its sentimentality in order to convey its charm—let alone its poignance in its release shortly after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The film’s quiet power is drawn from the verisimilitude of its drama, even in the limited perspectives we get of the years the movie spans, even with the rapid passages of time in the blink of an eye. Time itself passes so quickly, and it only occurs to us how many years have elapsed—how far a dynamic has come—when we look back.
If there’s any other filmmaker who came to mind most for me watching Beijing Watermelon, it’s Akira Kurosawa—in particular, the contemporary Kurosawa dramas like High and Low that thrive on painstakingly mapped-out blocking and mise-en-scène in even the most mundane settings and conversations, which makes their scant few major stylistic breaks wallop all the more striking. Obayashi, who considers Kurosawa his “father” in terms of influence,[1] follows suit similarly: even the most crowded and hectic of shots feel like careful ballets of subdued action, tiny universes with entire arcs in miniature that play out in real-time. His actors are often filmed in medium shots or further, to best allow the frame to catch everything entering and exiting; when Obayashi goes in for a close-up, it’s a startling window into wordless passing looks or introspections, a private moment of understanding with his leads before they return to others and put on their bravest face. His camera is often completely stationary; when he goes for a dolly or a zoom, even the simplest movements feel like a form of exhilaration.
And, like in High and Low, there too is a singular moment where Obayashi suddenly breaks the visual markers to reveal a greater truth about the story he is telling, one that has been bubbling beneath everything we’ve watched for the previous two hours. To telegraph the film’s unexpected pivot in its final twenty minutes would be to dampen its emotional resonance a bit, but it’s worth paying attention to the two timecards Obayashi deploys: “May 1989”—right at the top of the film, as part of the opening titles’ brief exposition—and “June 1989,” right as this pivot hits. To those with even a passing familiarity of the relevance of that latter month as it applies to the Chinese student body, it should be apparent what the film is directly calling attention to by noting that date, though it never explicitly names the massacre whose shadow looms over the production. Or, to paraphrase Haruzo in the film’s extended coda: “Our movie was never able to catch up to reality. Reality is sometimes more powerful than movies.”
This is, ultimately, Obayashi lending direct insight to the viewer about his approach to the film, even before his production ran up against real-life tragedy. No amount of embellishment could make the first two hours of this story more remarkable and touching than it already was, and no amount of stylization could render the gravity and immediacy of its final spans in sharper focus.
Obayashi once remarked in an interview that “film is like a dream because in a dream there [are] always contradictory elements. But the film as a dream always finds a solution to these contradictions.”1 As grounded in reality as it is, Beijing Watermelon might be the most telling example of this. Late in the film, Haruzo remarks about the nature of film as a medium that makes “cinematic dreams.” If Beijing Watermelon is a dream, it’s the most lucid kind—the one where you wake up, in a rush of clarity, and feel a much stronger conviction in how to care for your fellow man when they need it most.
Footnotes
1 Obayashi, Nobuhiko, “Film is something that will last forever,” interview by Andrew Daley, Eastern Kicks, 29 March 2017, https://www.easternkicks.com/features/filmmakers/nobuhiko-obayashi-interview/.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon