"Actress" is not just the story that charts the rise of Kinuyo Tanaka, played brilliantly by Sayuri Yoshinaga, who mesmerized and illuminated the screen with her charismatic performance of a legend, from her naively youthful days in pigtails, to coiffed professional veteran of the industry. We see how she started off in the studio system being one of many potential talents available, having her family's economical hopes all pinned on her, and down to having a sugar daddy of sorts in Hiroshi Shimizu (Toru Watanabe) looking over her shoulder, whom she would get into and out of an unhappy secret marriage. Sayuri Yoshinaga provided that spark to endear herself to the audience, and needless to say, made me sit up and wonder just how the real actress was like in person, with her steely guts and perseverance in an industry that saw its brightest and darkest days during militarism and WWII.
The movie turned out also to have almost half the time spent as a pseudo-documentary of early Japanese cinema, tracking how moving pictures were imported to the country, and spawned an industry. Filled with plenty of recognizable characters as directors and stars from an era long gone, it also had actual film clips spliced into the movie, as well as some recreation of scenes, especially those starring Kinuyo Tanaka. From silent movies, to talkies, and to the advent of colour, it's almost Japanese film history 101, and I guess you'd come to appreciate little nuggets of information such as the studio system, and how cinema as a whole, had come to being from the early days.
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