Customer Reviews

Village of Dreams

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Village of Dreams is simply enchanting. It vividly captures the heat of summer in postwar Japan as two identical twin brothers explore life in and around their village, get into all sorts of trouble with adults, and interact with each other. The viewer is soon swept into their world, a world where you are challenged in 112 minutes to listen for the crickets, smell the oppressive heat, taste their mom's cooking, and revel with them as they grow up sensing for the first time changes in themselves and their surroundings. Mieko Harada the actress who plays the twin's mother won the equivilent of an Academy Award for this portrayal. Many of us remember her as the villianess in Akira Kurosawa's RAN, what a different part this time. This film is highly recommended as an escape to another time, our lost childhood. Sit back, relax, let your senses envelope you, and enjoy VILLAGE OF DREAMS

So says their elder sister to Seizo and Yukihito, 8-year-old twin boys growing up in a Japanese farm village. 'Village of Dreams' relates one childhood year of the twins from the perspective of one of the brothers in middle age. It has something of a Japanese 'Little Rascals' air about it which may make it seem banal to those who've seen this sort of movie before from directors around the world. Nothing really traumatizes the boys; they only have the joys and sorrows of any child: the sexual curiosity, the friendships, the mysterious and frightening actions of adults, the illnesses, etc. The film is beautifully photographed, and it makes for a quiet two hours. The DVD has no extras at all. The medieval European background music by the Caterina Early Music Ensemble seems like a strange choice for such a purely Japanese film. Perhaps the lutes, shawms, psalteries, and recorders sound as exotic and eerie to Japanese ears as tradional Japanese music sounds to Westerners.

I came across this film at a small art house theatre in New York in 1998. It was recommended to me by a Spanish director who had a Japanese wife. I have watched it a dozen times since, and never grow tired of it. The naturalistic performances Higashi draws from the twins is masterful. The film avoids sentimentality, especially in the way it handles the the uncertain fate of the ruffian new boy in school, and the one fight scene between the brothers (surely a happy accident, it is so realistic). The framing is beautiful, and unlike many Japanese films that deal with rural family life, I didn't find the pace slow at all. Strangely, practically no one in Japan seems to know of this film. Like 'Firefly Dreams,' it is evocative of a particular time and location while having universal appeal. The old witches are funny, too. One of my top five contemporary Japanese films.

In spite of the slow pace of this movie and not so great video quality, I still found it quite enjoyable. This movie reminds me a little bit of Ozu's "Good Morning", although it does not have the same masterful skill and witty touch. This movie is like a cup of Japanese tea which you do not you gobble like soft drinks. By the way, the sound the other reviewer referred to is "Cicada", not "cricket"

At the beginning of _Village of Dreams, the viewer is introduced to the painter Tashima Seizo visiting his identical twin brother Yukihiko who is also a painter. The twin brothers are working on a collection of paintings depicting scenes from their home village which, like many other small villages, has been engulfed by the urban sprawl of progress. The film consists of one uninterrupted flashback depicting the early youth of the twins.

With their father constantly away on business, the twin boys reside with their mother, older sister, and a grumpy old man. The boys are picked on at school because their mother is also their teacher. The locals believe that she shows preference to Seizo and Yukihiko because they are her children, but she heaps praise on them and sends their pieces of artwork to contests because they are good. However, this is a sore spot in the community and the locals believe that the mother just has not assimilated herself to life in a small village.

The boys also suffer because they are a bit on the small size and, after their mother is forced to leave the school, their new teacher/principal marks them as targets for his random outbursts. However, although they are picked on by both adults and children, the twins do not suffer nearly as much as a poor adopted child named Senji and a poor adorable little girl named Hatsumi who spends her days working in her family's mulberry paper mill. Near the end of the film there is a very touching scene in which a crying Hatsumi, while rinsing her bleeding chapped feet, is taunted by some older boys.

The film basically follows the daily lives of the two brothers. They spend most of their days fishing, making eel and bird traps, and avoiding feeding the old man's goat. There are also a couple of scenes in which the boys show interest in the opposite sex, including one in which one of the boys accidentally gropes his older sister while stretching.

This film is pretty good, but a bit slow. Would not recommend it to the casual fan of Japanese film, but if you want to watch a heavily nostalgic film, with a touch of magical realism, you might enjoy this one.

This film is as slow as a day in your own childhood but with plenty to do and see in the nothing of it all. The vivid transparency from which the director coaxes all the many simple details is astonishing. This sort of cinema must be very hard to bring together as almost no one can really pull it off. The Japanese director Ozu was the master of it.And this is about as close as can get to a modern version of him. It's really about the events of two brothers in childhood and I can't say enough good about it.

I have seen it twice and I can only imagine it getting better with successive viewings. The only sort of awkward bit for me was when nature talked back in the guise of woodland hags etc.. but I never thought nature needed a human voice to speak for itself.

Village of Dreams is about two identical artists who work on children's books and now they share their childhood times as young boys, 8 or 9. The twins live primarily with their mother while their father is away on business. An old man claims to have adopted the family also. The mother is a schoolteacher who openly favors her own two children in the classroom and is reprimanded and criticized for doing so.

If you are not familiar with foreign film, or watch it infrequently, you may find this film very slow, especially since it runs two hours. I was not moved by the young boys, and it seem to be just sequence after sequence of incidences. We see them trapping eel quite often, into mischief, breaking bulbs, tearing down taro plants, and playful times with each other. There are incidences in school and the boys befriend a young social outcast. We also learn of the old hags who hang out (and sometimes in the trees) and remark over the twins, good or bad.

In other words nothing grabs the viewer to hold on. As I said, it is a series of repeated incidences that appear fractured. It is neither amusing or touching.

Warning: If you have youngsters and have not explained to them why women's and men's bodies are different, send them to the kitchen for a minute. The mother (with minimal frontal nudity in a round tub) shows her naked body to her one son who is in another tub. She explains and shows him why and how men and women are different. There is front nudity of the boys, as they skinnydip.

Poor translation with difficulty to read: Translation into different languages is always a challenge in foreign film marketed to outside countries. One director said you lose about 15 to 20 percent of translation. The translation of the boys comes across as too adult for children. So when translation is bad, you lose a lot.

Pass this one......Rizzo

I enjoyed this film , but it has nude childern and I did not think it was needed in the story .

Being an Oriental I am fairly familiar with films released by our geographical neighbours, although not as extensive as standard Hollywood productions. With Japanese films, whether it was made by a Kurusawa or a more obscure artisan, I can fairly adjudged them on a whole as lethargic in pace, inconspicuously lacks background music/instrumentals, and are generally pressed on celluluid films that are simply comparatively substandard. Village of Dreams, while touted as an award winner is a glaring testimony of this stunted Japanese film-making characteristic. Review it yourself. The pace alone wantingly needs tighter editing. It was the same character that can be seen even in Kurusawa's Ran - a "highly acclaimed" work that in my case, I couldn't even view for the third time, because even its DVD resolution has a quality that can only be likened to the eye-view of a person who's suffering his earliest stage of creeping glaucoma. Village of Dreams is so "relaxed" as if the filmmaker expects people like me to have an available time that they enjoyed in 1940s Japan in an obscure countryside. At the very least, the straight narrative of this film is a consolation, but with RAN, the actions were so hard to follow, you'd be puzzled who was fighting and attacking whom. The most unforgivable quality of this DVD transfer is the poor film stock. The picture approximates that of a "third generation" recording of a VHS copy. This means that you'll be sorely dissapointed of having to get a VHS-quality copy COPIED, in turn, from another VHS copy which was copied from the original VHS "master tape". Of course, the DVD transfer is not at fault, its simply that the Japanese despite their touted techno prowess just couldn't give us a decent film stock, that could at least preserve their comparatively well-made gems. The glaring deficiency of films like this comes even more obvious, when shown on high resolution TVs. I've viewed this film in a 29-inch Sony Wega Flat TV, and in a 50-inch Mitsubishi projection TV, from a Pioneer DVL 919 and 909. If not for the antics of the two children leads, Village comes off as wearisome. I bought this film despite its hefty price tag mainly because I'm a film collector. Its works like this that whets my appreciation for world cinema. Unfortunately, Village's poor resolution takes away gratifying cinematic enjoyment, as well as negating its "collectability" factor. This should have looked more glorious if it could approximate the celluluid quality of examples like What Dreams May Come or Dark City, but of course that's asking too much from those editing-challenged Japanese filmakers. I want to ask Amazon for a refund because this is not well worth its price value. I was compulsed to buy it because of its cover, I thought it was at least as exotically glorious-looking as KUNDUN, but it proved to be just a small, obscure production. Critics may raved about it, just like those Canadians did with BLACK ROBE, but the final word is that they're just run of the mill, albeit thoughtful, films.....

Being an Oriental I am fairly familiar with films released by our geographical neighbours, although not as extensive as standard Hollywood productions. With Japanese films, whether it was made by a Kurusawa or a more obscure artisan, I can fairly adjudged them on a whole as lethargic in pace, inconspicuously lacks background music/instrumentals, and are generally pressed on celluluid films that are simply comparatively substandard. Village of Dreams, while touted as an award winner is a glaring testimony of this stunted Japanese film-making characteristic. Review it yourself. The pace alone wantingly needs tighter editing. It was the same character that can be seen even in Kurusawa's Ran - a "highly acclaimed" work that in my case, I couldn't even view for the third time, because even its DVD resolution has a quality that can only be likened to the eye-view of a person who's suffering his earliest stage of creeping glaucoma. Village of Dreams is so "relaxed" as if the filmmaker expects people like me to have an available time that they enjoyed in 1940s Japan in an obscure countryside. At the very least, the straight narrative of this film is a consolation, but with RAN, the actions were so hard to follow, you'd be puzzled who was fighting and attacking whom. The most unforgivable quality of this DVD transfer is the poor film stock. The picture approximates that of a "third generation" recording of a VHS copy. This means that you'll be sorely dissapointed of having to get a VHS-quality copy COPIED, in turn, from another VHS copy which was copied from the original VHS "master tape". Of course, the DVD transfer is not at fault, its simply that the Japanese despite their touted techno prowess just couldn't give us a decent film stock, that could at least preserve their comparatively well-made gems. I bought this film despite its hefty price tag mainly because I'm a film collector. Its works like this that whets my appreciation for world cinema. Unfortunately, Village's poor resolution takes away gratifying cinematic enjoyment, as well as negating its "collectability" factor. This should have looked more glorious if it could approximate the celluluid quality of examples like What Dreams May Come or Dark City, but of course that's asking too much from those editing-challenged Japanese filmakers. I want to ask Amazon for a refund because this is not well worth its price value. I was compulsed to buy it because of its cover, I thought it was at least as exotically glorious-looking as KUNDUN, but it proved to be just a small, obscure production. Critics may raved about it, just like those Canadians did with BLACK ROBE, but the final word is that they're just run of the mill, albeit thoughtful, films.....