Sakuran
directed by Mika Ninagawa
starring Anna Tsuchiya, Miho Kanno
Radiance Film
Famed photographer Mika Ninagawa’s feature debut is not only a showcase for her distinctive visual style, it’s also a bold subversion of the usual courtesan tropes in Japanese exploitation cinema. Based on the 2003 manga by Moyoco Anno, Sakuran follows Kiyoha, a girl sold to a Yoshiwara brothel as an attendant who claws her way up to the lofty status of oiran (a high end courtesan), yet still yearns for a life beyond the pleasure quarter of Edo. With its candy-colored palette, anachronistic soundtrack, and unapologetically defiant heroine, the film reimagines the oiran narrative as an assertion of unlikely female agency.
Kiyoha begins at the very bottom, cleaning floors as a servant to an oiran. Oiran were high end courtesans who gained a relative amount of control over their clientele and even enjoyed celebrity status. Both in the film and in real life these women achieved fame, including having their likenesses captured in woodblock prints and sold as souvenirs. As Kiyoha rises through the ranks she yearns for freedom, watching a cherry tree inside the brothel walls and waiting for it to bloom, a sign she takes as her cue to escape. In the meantime, she resolves to become the best and most famous oiran in the quarter, even if she was not the most beloved amongst her peers, whom Kiyoha clearly does not view as her peers.
Anna Tsuchiya gives her all as Kiyoha, a feisty, sarcastic, pipe-smoking sex worker who runs her life and business on her own terms and needs little provocation to start a fight. She’s an Edo rockstar, and her attitude is far sexier than the usual portrayal of sex workers as tragic martyrs. Even though it is a highly physical performance, many of her best moments are when she conveys a wealth of information with a quick dash of her eyes or a hint of her wry smile. Historically, a courtesan who openly argued with clients probably wouldn’t have lasted long, but quibbling over accuracy misses the point in a film like Sakuran, which is all about style. Ninagawa, one of the leading figures of the 1990s onna no ko shashin (“girly photography”) movement, brings that ethos to the screen. That movement saw young women using consumer grade cameras to document their lives, their spaces, and their own notions of beauty. For these women, technical polish mattered less than telling personal narratives punctuated with bold colors and striking imagery.
Cherry blossoms and goldfish are recurring motifs in Ninagawa’s photography, and in Sakuran they take on clear symbolic weight. The blossoms mirror Kiyoha’s longing for freedom, while the goldfish evoke the courtesans themselves: objects of beauty, constantly on display, with death as their only real escape.
Ninagawa’s deft sense of visuals, pacing, and tone keeps Sakuran from falling into the trap of being too lightweight and becoming a nudie peepshow, or too heavy and becoming an exercise in recreational sadness. You root for Kiyoha at every turn, because she feels like a full, complex person rather than a trope. Both the character and the director demand that she is to neither be lusted after or pitied, and that, as much as the candy-colored spectacle, is what makes Sakuran blossom.
