User Reviews

In just four words, the English language title to this entry in Yoshida's 'anti-melodrama' series captures both the scenario and what is perhaps the film's most characteristic feature-the oppressively frozen mountain landscapes in which much of its action takes place. That sense of a reduced narrative-characters in 'elemental' settings, playing out 'elemental' passions-might serve for advertising copy, but there's a lot more going on here than the reductive essentialism such characterisations might imply. The paradoxical distancing by which Yoshida renders scenarios of passion-the 'anti' in 'anti-melodrama'-is in play from the beginning, as a pre-credits sequence introduces us to Yuriko (Yoshida's ever-present collaborator Mariko Okada), an employee at a beauty salon, the salon introduces in a defamiliarising overhead shot over which plays a disembodied voiceover relaying apparently disconnected pieces of gossip which loosely introduce us to the characters in elliptical overlays that immediately set things aslant. Post-credits, and a car stalls in the middle of a deserted road (the deserted settings another Yoshida trademark). The camera moves in-the passenger, Yuriko, is seeking to end her affair with the driver, Arika (Yukio Ninagawa), a teacher who drunkenly picked her up the previous year. Yuriko states that this was planned as their last trip, and constantly telling Arika that they need to break up. Refusing to take no for an answer, his attachment is as much based on hate as love: as they prepare to take a motorboat out into the middle of a lake, he considers murdering her, throwing her overboard, a threat-it's never clear how seriously we're meant to take it-only forestalled when she announces that she's pregnant. Refusing to let him take her to the hospital in Muroran, she instead arranges to meet the only man she trusts, a former lover, Kazuo (Isao Kimura), now married and working in a supervisory capacity in a factory. The pregnancy turns out to be phantom; Akira, who's followed her, is beset with jealousy, joining her in her hotel room as she reiterates the need to break up. The next morning, Yuriko waits at the train station, where she's arranged to meet Kazuo; again, Akira follows her, and there follows a kind of parody of the classic melodrama departure scene, as she switches trains trying to avoid the lovers who follow her to each. Deciding to head for the mountain resort where she and Kazuo broke up several years before, the triangulation continues, as she reveals that the break was due to Kazuo's impotence, a source, first for Akira's laughter and scorn, then for a kind of transmuted jealousy, as he flees into the snow, followed by Yuriko and Kazuo, whose passion is rekindled by the chase. It's never clear where Akira's heading, and the dramatic meanders of this final section are deliberately halting, at once over the top and curiously flat: eventually, Akira commits suicide in a jealous rage and the traumatised lovers bear his body through a blizzard, the film ending on Okada's anguished scream. Reduced to narrative summary, that scenario might very well sound like over-baked melodrama, but its enactment is something else again.

Yoshida presents us with a world of snow, of blocked, directionless, staggering movement; faces, shadows, body parts cut up into near-abstract compositions; miniaturised figures stumbling through snow on a seemingly pointless quest, as if the landscape can't wait to erase any trace of their presence, these figures who don't even cast a shadow. The framing resolutely avoids indices of intimacy, both in terms of in-camera movement and the juxtapositions of montage, of editing and post-production. Thus, while the camera is generally static, several scenes notably deploy extensive hand-held camera motions, swirling around characters with a kind of roving curiosity that often moves away from the character delivering dialogue to focus on apparently inconsequential detail-an unmade bed, the corner of a room-with a kind of anxious inaccuracy that doesn't heighten voyeuristic intimacy (the feeling that 'we', the camera cipher, are in the room with the characters) so much as reinforce difference and distance. When the camera's not moving, Yoshida shoots faces to the side, from above, behind windows, in mirrors, cut off by the cropped angles of furniture, and the like; or otherwise isolates the figures in deserted streets, landscapes, indeterminate spaces (the logistical challenge of emptying out every location of those who normally people it must have been half the battle of the filmmaking in the first place).

Yoshida later suggested that entire motivation for the film lies in this question of impotence: "The theme seemed very clear to me. A woman loves an impotent man. This kind of situation can easily happen, can't it? But can men - leaving aside the impotent one - can the other men, in general, admit it? Can they forgive it? For man it is unthinkable. A platonic love is not impossible, but it's not real love". (Impotence is again a plot motor in his previous film, 'Impasse' and again in 'Eros plus Massacre'.) What Yoshida's comments suggest, though, is that the question is one of relations 'between men', of homosocial anxieties, the trade in women, and the spectre of biological reproduction as index of futurity, as mark of social standing. What would there be to 'forgive' about impotence? What is being sinned against here? What is the 'real' (or, for that matter, the 'love') in 'real love'? If Yoshida's vocabulary here suggests a kind of spiritual or at ideal register-the thinkable, the forgivable, the platonic, love, the real-by which we conventionally understand the physical, the film itself also serves to destabilise such elisions. The film sets up a series of parallels-spirit and flesh, 'platonic' and physical love, potence and impotence-constructed around male anxiety, jealousy and possessiveness. As Yoshida's said of 'Akitsu Springs': "for me, with the burdens of my generation and my society, the historical responsibility of that period is on the men's side, not the women's, so the male side must be responsible for everything bad that happens". Above all, then, the film is concerned with the gendered nature of social roles-Yuriko, having experienced the capital city, to which she fled after the ending of her affair with Kazuo, has returned to a Sapporo filmed more like a wintry village than a city; their retreat to the mountains a further distancing from, a playing out of more existential conflicts that are nonetheless shown to be completely tied in with the anxieties, power plays and violence of gendered social roles.

I was never yours, "you only passed through my flesh", Yuriko informs Arika in a final gesture of rejection. The choice between the platonic/impotent and erotic/potent is one that's ultimately posed by Arika-that's to say, the terms are set by a heteropatriarchal view, by a binary and dualistic thinking which reifies biological capacity as a kind of base overlaid and intermingled with the superstructure of erotic or romantic love. Might Yuriko and Kazuo's encounter find a way through these questions of platonic idealisation (love as spiritual) and physical degradation (love as physical)? That closing scream suggests not. In Yoshida's next film, 'Farewell to the Summer Light' these questions of futurity and the recapturing of the past are posed in more explicitly historical terms, as a formative generational trauma-that of Hiroshima and Nagaski-begins to name itself. In 'Affair in the Snow', we're left with a perpetually stalling car, the perpetually changing trains, the frozen coal hammered out of the carriage by the relentless rhythm of multiple hammers: a carpet of frozen brightness, an end title, a death, scream that resolves nothing.