Memory & Desire

Screening: 13 Jun, 6:30pm

New Zealand
1998

Director / Screenplay: Niki Caro
Producer: Owen Hughes
Production Designer: Grant Major
Editor: Margot Francis
Music: Peter Scholes
Sayo: Yuri Kinugawa
Keii: Eugene Nomura
Nod: Joel Tobeck
Jeanette: Brenda Kendall
Maude: Joy Watson
Sayo's Father: Takeshi Ohbayashi
Sayo's Stepmother: Midori Takei
35mm
89 mins
R16

A contemporary drama about two Japanese honeymooners in New Zealand and the tragedy which befalls them. Keiji, a newly married Japanese tourist, drowns mysteriously on a New Zealand beach. His distraught widow, Sayo, tells their story. Sayo and Keiji, deeply in love but socially mismatched, marry and honeymoon in New Zealand away from the disapproval of Keiji's mother. Against the often banal background of the bus tour, the couple live out their intense sexual passion. But frustration arises as the inexperienced Keiji cannot make love to his new wife.

After his shocking death, Sayo must return to Tokyo to share an apartment with her stepmother who despises and blames her for Keiji's death. At night, in her grief, Sayo travels the subway to a love hotel, with the one tangible memory of Keiji she has - a brief video of him taken in New Zealand. She descends into a world populated only by memories.

Driven to desperation, Sayo returns to New Zealand to the cave where she and Keiji made love before he died. There she sets up a primitive home and waits for her lover to return. Starved and grieving, she begs Keiji to come to her. He does, in the form of a local fisherman who takes care of Sayo and, by becoming her lover, allows her to resolve her relationship with Keiji.

The seaside community learn of her presence and summon the authorities. Sayo leaves graciously, fare-welling her spirit lover at the waves' edge and returning to Japan.

NZFC webpage

Preceded by:

Nocturne in a Room

New Zealand
1992

Director: Anthony McCarten
15 mins
16mm

A covert hit of the 1993 festivals, this black comedy features William Kircher's memorable solo turn as a depressed concert pianist.

Playwright Anthony McCarten's first film is a good-as-perfect miniature... Bravo!

Bill Gosden, 1993 Wellington Film Festival Programme

Internet Movie Database listing