Village of Dreams

Identical twin brothers Yukihiko and Seizo are famous artists embarking on a collaboration — a book based on their idyllic childhood in a remote hamlet near Kochi. Their beautiful paintings sweep us back to 1948, when they were in third grade. Known to everyone as “the brats,” the two grapple with catfish in the river, chase birds in the woods, and cause general mischief in the village and school. But the plot is secondary to the film’s wonderfully vibrant sensations of childhood — the rich details of family life, the unintentional cruelty of youth, the mysteriously beautiful nature that envelopes them, the strong emotional bond between the twins, the fierce fights they enter into a the drop of a hat — are as memorable as any film in the last decade. Director Yoichi Higashi’s sixteenth film in a praise-filled career is a charming and sparkling jewel.

Reviews

It's the unusual film that captures the rhythms and moods of childhood with an intensity that transports you back in time. But when one does, you are reminded that every childhood is in some sense the same. The world looms much larger when you're small, and its emotional climate is tropical, as sunshine and cloudbursts follow each other with dizzying speed and unpredictability. The physical world is experienced with a raw hungry intensity that will never be felt again, and everyday objects often seem mysteriously animated with personality. In its most engrossing moments, the Japanese director Yoichi Higashi's beautiful film "Village of Dreams" seems to lose track of time exactly the way a child does while playing outdoors on a spring afternoon that seems to extend for days. The movie is set in a rural Japanese village in 1948, but it could almost be any sleepy hamlet where children roll around on the grass, gaze searchingly into brooks, catch fish, play naughty pranks and imagine themselves observed by pagan spirits. The main characters, Seizo (Keigo Matsuyama) and Yukihiko (Shogo Matsuyama), are a pair of mischievous, artistically inclined identical twins in the third grade. Adapted from Seizo Tashima's memoir, "The Village of My Paintings," the movie is his autobiography, framed by short scenes of the middle-aged author and his twin brother reminiscing about their shared past. Although the time is only three years after the end of World War II, the cataclysms of recent history seem remote, except for a couple of references to Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Life may be hard, but the family is able to put food on the table. The twins' parents, a civil servant who spends much of his time traveling and his wife, a grade school teacher, have only recently moved to the country with the boys and an elder sister, where they are the wards of a wealthy landowner. If the twins are promising artists, they are also troublemakers who impulsively cut down a neighbor's taro plants, try to hide their schoolmates' shoes and befriend a strange outcast boy who lives nearby. The film's meandering rhythm evokes the unstructured way time seems to stretch out during childhood, and this aura of indolence helps enlarge small events like a case of tonsillitis or an accidental wound inflicted while making a eel trap out of bamboo poles. The movie also confronts the children's sexual curiosity with a refreshing directness, and in one scene the mother bluntly shows her sons how they emerged from her body. "Village of Dreams" also brings in touches of magic realism. Three gossipy witch-like crones perched in a tree observe the village life and comment critically on the day-to-day goings-on. The juxtaposition of the supernatural with the almost hyperrealistic gives the film a resonating double vision. An idyllic childhood world that exists only in memory, whose petty squabbles and personal growing pains are forgotten by all except those who experienced them, also holds an element of the eternal." - Stephen Holden, New York Times