Memories of Matsuko

There are some movies that use a certain element of a movie, music, to tell the story. These are called musicals. Most musicals use singing to convey feelings or events that are happening. It can be either indirect singing towards the audience or it can be the characters singing directly at you. Today we look at a very…. interesting movie that is somewhat like a musical. It is a Japanese production that was not released in America so if you haven’t heard about it then you’re not alone. Today we look at Memories of Matsuko.

This is a very tragic movie that tells us a story of Matsuko and here turbulent life of love, loss, and sadness. When is say this is a sad film I mean it. Every time it looks up for her something bad happens to her and she’s back to sadness. It conveys this through what else, music. It’s used a lot in this film to either breeze through a portion of her life and telling us the whole thing through montage, or to tell us how she’s feeling, or to tell you if something good or bad is happening. There is one song that plays through the whole movie to tell you if its happy or not and only for her. It does get annoying that they repeat it over and over and over.

Another thing about this film is its Japanese so there are some parts you may not get. There are jokes made in this film that you can tell where supposed to be funny but ran flat. There are also things that America doesn’t have that japan does and we don’t know what it is so we don’t get it. But some of that also helps the story because there are some themes that seem over the top and help to emphasize the event happening before you.

Overall the movie was an interesting watch. The story was nice but felt maybe to tragic. It was long but I don’t think too long. The visuals where appealing at most points. The music was also a good choice at a lot of points and was a good decision to push the story. I’m not saying that I would recommend it to anyone, but I actually enjoyed it. It also pushed a good lesson onto us. That a person is not valued by what they receive but by what we give.