Anyone seen this award-winning movie Deep River?

[Guest guest]

" Deep River " won acclaim at New Delhi's International Film Festival

and the Ecumenical Award at the World Film Festival in Montreal. It

caught Indian film critics' attention because it is about the

Japanese' finding their " lost Indian roots. " Explains Kumai, " We

Japanese are very much influenced by Indian culture and, from the

point of view of a Japanese, India is our motherland. " Many Japanese

travel yearly to India (65,000 in 1996), often to visit Buddhist

holy sites. Japan is the largest donor nation to India, and, after

the economic reform, India's fifth largest investor.

 

" Deep River " is based upon Shusaku Endo's award-winning novel of the

same name. It is an exploration into the meaning of India for four

individuals. One is a World War II veteran (played by the legendary

Toshiro Mifune), desperate to quell horrible war memories

experienced on India's Burmese border. The second is a businessman

looking for his wife who died and who, he is told, has been reborn

near Banaras. He is torn by the guilt that all during their

marriage, while she loved and served him with extraordinary

selflessness, he gave her very little affection. The third and

central character is Mitsuko (Kumiko Akiyoshi, Japan's top film

actress), a divorcée, lost at midlife and looking for meaning. The

fourth is Otsu, a spiritually reflective man whom Kumiko seduced on

a dare from her friends and then cruelly dumped. He was a Catholic

—

rare in Japan — who went to a seminary in France, then to a

monastery in Israel. Finally finding no comfortable place in the

Western expression of Christianity, he came to Banaras, joined an

ashram, and took up work at the cremation grounds. " Europeans

consider God and man to be mutually opposed but, being Japanese, I

cannot ignore the great vital energy of nature, " Otsu explains to

Mitsuko. " I believe God exists within man, while embracing man,

trees and flowers, the Great Life Force. And the most important

thing is love. " . . .

 

Much of the movie was shot in Banaras by a cast and crew of 50

Japanese and 70 Indians. After the production, director Kumai

said, " I think our staff each encountered the Ganga just like the

movie's characters. The holy power of the Ganga revealed Herself

through them. We received awareness of the spiritual world, so

forgotten in today's consumerist society of Japan. Since World War

II, we have developed materially, but are we happy? My film shows

how these characters come to find in India what they could not find

at home. They ask, 'What is the most important treasure in one's

life — material pleasure or spiritual pleasure and contentment as

is found in the Hindu religion?' "

 

India Today, March 1997