The Milkwoman

 Posted on January 8, 2024  |  5 minutes  |  974 words  |  Aldo Pusey

Akira Ogata's second feature deals with the long suppressed love between a middle-aged man and woman. "The Milkwoman" follows its 50-year-old titular heroine Minako as she climbs up and down innumerable stone steps in Nagasaki, delivering milk. Pic has only an outside chance at an arthouse run.

A serene meditation on opportunities missed and options not taken, Akira Ogata’s second feature, after his generally well-received 2000 “Boy’s Choir,” deals with the long suppressed love between a middle-aged man and woman. “The Milkwoman” follows its 50-year-old titular heroine Minako (veteran actress Yuko Tanaka) as she climbs up and down innumerable stone steps in the picturesque, hilly city of Nagasaki, delivering milk, bottles clinking. But, unhurried pacing and relatively straight-ahead narrative give pic, a Jury Prize co-winner at Montreal’s World Film Fest, only an outside chance at an arthouse run.

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Minako has been in love with Keita (Ittoku Kishibe) since she was a teenager. But when Keita’s father and Minako’s mother died together under scandalous circumstances, the high school sweethearts separated. Minako has remained unmarried, working afternoons at a supermarket checkout after her morning milk-runs. Keita is an official at the Bureau of Children’s Affairs and is married to a terminally ill woman.

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Both Minako and Keita have learned to subsist on reduced expectations. Asked what her wildest dream is, Minako replies that she would like to give milk to everyone in the city. Meanwhile, Keita has pared down his days to a series of small kindnesses and careful set routines.

When Keita’s invalid wife Yoko (Akiko Nishina), in the longstanding cinematic tradition of the altruistic dying spouse, tries to unite the former lovers, it stirs up all kinds of contradictory emotions in Minako, anger foremost among them.

Helmer Ogata, who says he wanted to film the thoughts of his characters, has devised several techniques, from the fairly standard letter-penned, voice-over inner monologue, the favored method of communication of Keita’s wife, to the computer-typed account of Minako’s life that her writer aunt (Misako Watanabe) is scribing.

But the most audacious device is the one that opens the film and resonates throughout: the child Minako’s letter to her future self outlining what she believes her fate will be, read aloud over images of the middle-aged Minako’s very different destiny. The viewer comes to realize, however, as the pic progresses that the distance between Minako’s youthful aspirations and her present-day existence is perhaps not as great as initially supposed.

Close-ups of Tanaka’s face — weary and resigned in work mode, mobile and wonderfully expressive in her heart-to-hearts with her writer aunt — map out pic’s emotive itinerary, with side trips to Kishibe’s somewhat funny-looking mug or the worried, ethereal beauty of Nishina.

Tech credits are top-drawer.

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The Milkwoman

Japan

  • Production: A Paradise Cafe/Pugpoint Japan production. Produced by Shiro Oiwake, Hatanaka Motohiro. Directed by Akira Ogata. Screenplay, Kenji Aoki.
  • Crew: Camera (color), Norimichi Kasamatsu; editor, Yosuke Yafune; music, Shinichiro Ikebe; production designer, Hidehumi Hanatani; sound (DTS Stereo), Yokomizo Masatoshi. Reviewed at Montreal World Film Festival (competing), Sept. 4, 2005. Running time: 127 MIN.
  • With: With: Yuko Tanaka, Ittoku Kishibe, Akiko Nishina, Misako Watanabe, Koichi Ueda, Teruyuki Kagawa.

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