The 2013 Japanese release, Pecoross’ Mother and Her Days, comes to America with rather impressive credentials. It was filmed by 86-year-old veteran director Azuma Morisaki, who became in 2012 – following the death, at age 100, of the esteemed Kaneto Shindo – the oldest working Japanese filmmaker. (I have never seen any of Morisaki's other films.) Pecoross won the Best Film Awards for 2013 from both the venerable film journal Kinema Jumpo and its rival, the quarterly Eiga Geijutsu. This is unusual, because the two publications seem to have vastly different editorial standards. Several titles on Kinejun's Ten Best films list for 2013 wound up on Eiga Geijutsu's Ten Worst list. Yet both publications agreed that Pecoross was not only a good film, but the best of its year. What is it about this gentle, unpretentious little comedy about a middle-aged son and his senile mother that so impressed the critics of these divergent publications?
A brief, animated sequence at the beginning of the film (which is based on the autobiographical story of a manga artist that became a surprise bestseller in Japan) gets the basic plot out of the way. The hero (Ryo Iwamatsu), whose real name is Yuichi – a "pecoross" is a word for a small onion, which suggests both the shape and the baldness of the protagonist’s head – is a cheerfully immature baby boomer widower with a teenage son, living in Nagasaki. Yuichi sings his own songs in a café and draws manga about his difficult life when he’s not working, unsuccessfully, at his day job as a salesman. (When he should be outside selling, he prefers to hang out at his favorite bar, looking at porn and drinking.) In other words, Yuichi is a likable scapegrace, whose life would be quite content were he not faced with his total inability to care for his Alzheimer's-stricken mother, Mitsue (Harue Akagi). Mitsue is a lovable old woman, but impossible to live with: she calls Yuichi at all hours about nonsensical crises, almost gets herself run over when Yuichi tries to back up the car, hides her possessions in secret drawers and keeps forgetting that her sister and husband are both long dead.
Although set in contemporary Nagasaki, this film has very deep roots in a specific genre of Japanese film history dating back at least to the late 1920s: the haha mono, or "mother film." As Audie Bock writes in her classic book Japanese Film Directors, Shiro Kido, the head of Shochiku Studios, which originated the genre, intended this type of picture to "show that the self-sacrificing mother deserves gratitude and obedience." Though Pecoross' tone is comic rather than tragic, as so many haha mono were, its moral imperatives remain the same, and the story compels us to ask the question, "Will Yuichi do the right thing for his mother… and grow up a little in the process?"
Pecoross can claim some very real strengths and some equally obvious weaknesses. The movie manages the difficult feat of being genuinely heartwarming rather than cloying, and when Yuichi starts to believe that his mother will ultimately forget who he is, the story actually becomes very moving, thanks to Iwamatsu’s performance. Its biggest flaw is its complete lack of drama. Yuichi's decision, which we know is inevitable, to have Mitsue placed in a nursing home comes quite early in the film, and all suspense basically ends there. (Interestingly, he never worries, as almost any American might, how he will pay for the cost of her stay: does this reflect a difference between the American and Japanese insurance systems?) Like so many Japanese films, the story is driven by character, not plot, but these characters are engaging enough to make us forget the lack of narrative drive.
There is much humor in the film, and whenever it’s rooted in realistic observation of Yuichi's dilemma, it works very well. After a visit to the nursing home, Mitsue's younger sisters (who are themselves quite elderly) make cruel fun of how spaced out she seems and, like a cartoon balloon, we overhear Yuichi thinking bitterly, "Both aunties are also losing it!" Some of the humor seems forced, however, such as the recurring gag in which another man, whose mother is living in the same nursing home, keeps adjusting a toupee that won’t stay fixed on his head, which happens to be as onion-like in its baldness as that of Pecoross.
The elaborate flashback sequences revealing memories from Pecoross' grim childhood in the postwar era seemed to me by far the most powerful in the movie. Yuichi's tall, bespectacled father (well played by Ryo Case) appears at first glance a typical, mild-mannered Japanese sarariman (salary man), but behind that bland façade, he’s a total nutcase: a heavy drinker with delusions of persecution – probably brought on by the war – and free with his fists with Yuichi's mother when in a drunken rage. At one point, Mitsue is driven to such despair that she's on the verge of drowning herself in a lake – and would have no hesitation in taking little Yuichi down with her. This is pretty harrowing stuff, and these scenes of desperation, confusion and misery provide welcome context and depth to the comedy.
I’m wondering if an official release has been planned for Pecoross and His Mother in the U.S. I hope so. Pecoross is a film that many Americans with aging parents could easily relate to. Despite some problematical elements, it could, like the late Juzo Itami's surprise success Tampopo in the mid-1980s, become a hit in America.
