The Makioka Sisters

Director: Kon Ichikawa

1983 / 140min / 35mm

Among the greatest Japanese films of the 1980s, Ichikawa’s wistful adaptation of Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s novel about the four daughters of a prosperous Osaka family in decline, set in the before-the-storm year of 1938, is a movie marked by moments of unspoken longing and overpowering beauty—a parade of gorgeous kimono fabrics or a viewing of the spring cherry blossoms—born forth on an anachronistic but somehow perfect synth score. At once a touching requiem for both the prewar era and the classic Japanese cinema of the postwar years, courtesy of one of its masters.