花落 花ちりぬ

Set against the backdrop of an imperial victory in the civil war leading up to the Meiji Restoration, Fallen Blossoms tells the story of the sorrows of women in a geisha house in Kyoto by recounting the relationships of its inhabitants.

Alexander Jacoby & Johan Nordström wrote:

Ishida’s original and brilliant film tells history as ‘her story’. Against the backdrop of a victory for the imperial forces in the civil war leading up to the Meiji Restoration, Ishida recounts the relationships among the inhabitants of a Kyoto geisha house, producing what has been described by Noël Burch as “one of the most remarkable community portraits ever filmed”. The film is set completely inside the house, with only female characters ever seen on screen.

For Burch, “the exclusion from the scene of men, patrons or soldiers, is a meaningful corollary of the exclusion of Japanese women from the history of the country”. Ishida narrates his story using an imaginative cinematic style in which shots are almost never repeated. The narrative, Burch notes, evokes Chekhov, but he judges its “combination of a restricted, unified setting and continual renewal of the imagery” to be unparalleled in conventional narrative cinema.