Thirst For Love

The final film in the Eclipse Series 28: The Warped World of Koreyoshi Kurahara is Thirst For Love and it was my favorite in the collection. That being said I enjoyed all of them and most of them were revelations. This films is an adaptation of a Yukio Mishima novel. it is the melodramatic story of a beautiful young widow, Estuko (Ruriko Asaoka), who drifts into the role of mistress to the tyrant-like patriarch of the family, played by Nobu Nakamura, on a small estate outside of Osaka. However, she finds herself attracted to the young indifferent caretaker, Saburo (Tetsuo Ishidate) and this brings out the worst in her character: "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned..." It calls to mind the Douglas Sirk films of Hollywood like All That Heaven Allows. The execution of the film is full of artistry in the myriad of techniques used by Kurahara: exquisite framing, dolly camera movements, aerial shots, still frames and freeze frames, slow motion, the use of mirrors, strategic use of color in two parts, close ups and panning away. It seems unfortunate that he morphed into a semi-documentarian of animal films for the masses. It seems as though he was as much a victim to the changing of the times sand the rise of television that ended Japan's third golden age of film making of the 60s.