Last night I saw this lovely film House of Himiko during the SFIFF.
There was surely a reason why the theater was packed! Catering to Japanese culture fanatics as well as the GLBT community, this film touches on great points of humanism, acceptance, affection, and the delicate balance of relationships between a number of ebullient characters within a seaside gay retirement community.
Old.Japanese.Queens.
Now if that doesn’t make your mind explode to some degree with the image, then have it explode with cherry blossom fireworks further when you see the delicate unpacking narative that explores the delicacies of love, devotion, desire, and affection as you move further and further into the lives and intricacies of all the ebullient characters there.
There’s Ruby, the pink haired and balding queen who insists on being reincarnated as a ballerina in his next life and delights over the phrase Picky Piki Piki!, the incantation of magic used by an Anime character in delightful rainbow garb.
Haruhiko, the dreamy lover of our central character Himiko, and his conflict between his own youth and desire, and his affection and devotion to his lover who is dying.
There’s of course Himiko, our aging queen who’s dying from cancer, the former owner of a trendy nigthclub who decided in his winter years to create this respite of a seaside home for himself and his friends. He’s in struggles to resolve his relationship with…
Saori, his daughter from a marriage years ago. Saori is embittered, dispassionate, and frustrated by being drawn into this foreign community of acceptance and warmth in a lifestyle that she’s rejected her entire life because of the abandonent that she and her mother experienced.
Brilliant supporting roles include a closet queen/former bank branch manager, a retired school teacher, a former yakuza tattooed gentleman, and a cheerfully self aware young caretaker named “Chubby”.
Picky, piki, piki. This film is magic.
4/5 Pigtails. It’s a bit slow moving at the beginning and I wish there was just a touch more backstory on all the characters and how they got to Le Maison Himiko.
*****
SFIFF Description
How a culture deals with its aging population and how it relates to its gay community are two measures of its humanity. The latest film from Isshin Inudo, who specializes in offbeat comedy, asks how Japan’s aging homosexuals will fare, and the answer is, with the same outsider resilience that got them through life thus far. The House of Himiko is a beautiful seaside rest home for gay men, founded by the former proprietor of a legendary Ginza transvestite bar. Moving slowly through his domain, the stone-faced aging beauty in flowing kimono faces death from cancer. A devoted young assistant, Haruhiko, tricks Himiko’s long-estranged daughter Saori into working at the home, which is populated by everyone from gentlemen chess players who spent a lifetime hiding their sexuality to cross-dressers whose burden of female identity has driven them “flaming.†Inudo’s smart visual sense makes the film’s finer moments resonate beyond quirky comedy—as when the residents, taking in the reality of losing one of their own, are suffused in a totally yellow light; or when they all gather on the balcony to blissfully watch tattooed young men bathing in the waves. We catch on much quicker than Saori—sullen in her abandonment-induced homophobia—to the realization that the feelings at play here run much deeper than the desire to wear (or not to wear) a dress. It is about the desire to love, and to die, as one chooses. Popular young stars Joe Odagiri as the searching Haruhiko and Kou Shibasaki as the emotionally crippled Saori play beautifully against type.
Mezon do Himiko
World Cinema
Japan, 2005, 111 minutes
SHOWTIMES
Thu, Apr 27 / 5:45 / Castro / HOUH27C
CREDITS
- dir Isshin Inudo
- prod Osamu Kubota, Shinji Ogawa
- scr Aya Watanabe
- cam Takahiro Tsutai
- editor Hirohide Abe
- mus Haruomi Hosono
- cast Kou Shibasaki, Joe Odagiri, Min Tanaka, Hidetoshi Nishijima
- source Asmik Ace Entertainment, 6-1-24 Roppongi, Minato-ku, 106-8553 Tokyo, Japan FAX: 81-3-5413-2841 EMAIL: intl@asmik-ace.co.jp
- web http://himiko-movie.com/