Like an amalgam of "Amelie," "Big Fish" and pretty much every depressing movie there is, "Memories of Matsuko" is simultaneously a charming and heartbreaking lampoon to the disgraced roles of women in Japanese cinema set amidst the world of Japanese kitsch, AV idols, and Yakuza gang members. Tetsuya Nakamura's genuinely heartfelt saga, charting her tragic heroine's life before she is found murdered in a grassy area not far from her slipshod apartment, at the very least superficially recalls Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire" in as much as that both films' leads, mere victims of bad choices and circumstances, struggle to find the true meaning of joy in their godforsaken lives, as it is that the narratives are mostly told in flashbacks and driven by a fractured timeline.
In the present day, a gruffly obese Matsuko Kawajiri (Miki Nakatani) is found murdered and Shou Kawajiri (Eita), her nephew by her estranged brother (Teruyuki Kagawa), is tasked by his father to clean her apartment after her cremation. He never saw her before but there, meeting Matsuko's raucous punk neighbor (Gori) and the chief suspect for her aunt's slaying (Yusuke Iseya) who provide clues to her aunt's identity, he gradually pieces the unbelievably hard-knock adventures of her departed aunt. As the film explores Matsuko's constantly frustrating search for happiness with the right man, it becomes a surprisingly bittersweet love story interspersed with musical numbers running the gamut from Christian hymns to cheeky J-pop tunes.
Following his brazen though a bit hollow "Kamikaze Girls," writer-director Nakamura, a veteran of TV commercials, conveys the vaudeville-style film with gloriously saturated colors, highly diffused lighting, and a blistering cacophony of Nipponese pop culture to define Matsuko's epitonic past that sometimes, it feels as though the audacious employment of visual smorgasbord threaten to derail the emphasis from its characters. Still, Nakamura's direction is blissful, preoccupied by the premise that the constant pursuit for love and affection eventually pays dividends -- though sometimes in less expected ways -- as established early in the film's opening credit sequence that recalls classic musicals and in Nakitani's happy pap-pap trot in La La Land. It's Utopian thinking but its groundwork on the chronic impediment of the feminine role in a male-dominated culture and the ability of selfless pursuit to decimate that stigma is authentic and beautiful.
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