Picture Bride (Blu-ray Review)
Director
Kayo HattaRelease Date(s)
1995 (September 24, 2025)Studio(s)
Cecile Films/Thousand Cranes Filmworks/Miramax Films (Imprint Asia/Via Vision Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: B+
- Video Grade: C
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: A
Review
[Editor’s Note: This is a Region-Free Australian Blu-ray import.]
Picture Bride (1995) is a nice, little film, an historical humanist drama distilled from real history and personal anecdotes about a particular time and place, from people that were there, and made by sympathetic, indefatigable filmmakers determined to tell that story. You’ll be glad you saw it, too, though you may have little interest to watch it again... except for the brief, cameo appearance by an iconic actor in a cleverly conceived if small role. That was, at least for me, one reason I wanted to see it again after 25 or so years.
In 1918 Japan, teenager Riyo (Youki Kudoh), her parents both dead from tuberculosis, is left with little choice but to agree to become a “picture bride,” in an arranged marriage to a sugarcane plantation worker in far-off Hawaii, a marriage to a man she has never met. Arriving in Honolulu, she’s horrified to discover that the man to whom she is betrothed, Matsuji (Akira Takayama), is in his 40s, many years older than his old photograph suggested. Nevertheless, she goes through with the wedding ceremony and moves into his shack on the plantation. She resolves to save money working there to secure a passage back home.
Life on the plantation, overseen by Portuguese managers, is backbreaking, but so determined is Riyo to save money that she takes on a second job, doing laundry with young mother Kana (Tamlyn Tomita), whose husband, Kanzaki (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) occasionally beats her and like Matsuji, loses much of his earnings gambling.
The film sticks close to Riyo as she tries to adjust to this new life and alien culture mixing Japanese, Scots, Americans, Portuguese, and native Hawaiians. Matsuji tries to win Riyo over and, at one point, great tragedy strikes the plantation. Based on personal stories handed down through the generations, Picture Bride distills these into a personal history of one young woman, in a drama of considerable verisimilitude.
Originally conceived as a short by filmmaking student Kayo Hatta, the project was expanded into a feature-length drama financed by Japanese-American investors and corporate sponsors, eventually winning a distribution deal by Miramax. (The end credits note literally hundreds of these contributors.) Though only her first film, Hatta’s direction is assured and the lyrical script, co-written by Hatta with sister Mari, is professional and dramatically sound. Youki Kudo (Mystery Train, The Crazy Family), the movie star and professional pop singer, got behind the project as well, using her fame and influence to secure additional funds from Japan when money ran out. Supporting the production are a number of veteran actors: classical Japanese cinema actress Yoko Sugi, by this time working in a hotel in Little Tokyo in Los Angeles, plays Riyo’s aunt in the opening scene and Nobu McCarthy’s narrates the story as the older Riyo. Jason Scott Lee has a tiny part, and Moe Keale from Hawaii Five-O turns up briefly as a fisherman.
But lending the most weight is the poignant cameo appearance by Toshiro Mifune. The plantation workers are treated to a traveling cinema, showing a (silent era) Japanese chambara (swordplay) film, Mifune the benshi, or silent film narrator—benshi being a bigger draw for Japanese audiences than the movie itself. Surrounded by workers, he instructs two children—pointedly named Toshiro and Akira—how to properly act like a samurai, and for a brief moment, the elderly Mifune of Seven Samurai and Yojimbo lights up the screen one last time.
It was Mifune’s penultimate film appearance. He had various health problems but primarily was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. In his last film, Deep River, released the following year, Mifune, in another brief appearance is shockingly emaciated and his character bedridden, as Mifune himself mostly already was by that point. (He died in 1997.) But that fleeting spark of the Mifune of old makes Picture Bride worth watching all by itself. That the rest of the film is also quite good adds to its modest riches.
Unfortunately, Imprint’s worldwide Blu-ray debut of Picture Bride is a mixed bag. The audio and supplements are excellent, but the 1.85:1 widescreen picture transfer is a major disappointment. Though technically 1080p, the image unaccountably is notably soft and lacking in detail. The color is good, but it’s the kind of transfer that had me constantly adjusting my projector’s focus, as if the image couldn’t possibly be that soft. (My guess is that this is either an old video transfer and/or made using inferior film elements, such as an internegative.) The LPCM 2.0 stereo is much better, bringing ambient Hawaiian nature and Mark Adler’s good musical score to the front and surround speakers. In both English and Japanese, the film defaults to English subtitles for the Japanese dialogue. The disc itself is Region-Free.
The bountiful extras appear to be mostly derived from earlier home video versions. They consist of an audio commentary by director Kayo Hatta—who, sadly, died in a drowning accident in 2005 when she was just 47—and who appears again, along with stars Kudoh and Tomita, in The Picture Bride Journey, an informative archival featurette that includes behind-the-scenes footage, including some of Mifune. Also included is a Youki Kudoh musical video tie-in with the film, and a trailer. New are The Memory of Water, a video essay by film critic Walter Chaw, and The Way of the Benshi, an interview with Japanese film historian Daisuke Miyao.
Picture Bride is a sweet, modest but important little film about a historical subject largely unknown to most viewers. It’s informative and interesting, and widely acclaimed when it was new, and while the video transfer is lacking, deserves to be remembered.
- Stuart Galbraith IV