User reviews

The English title for this movie, which for most English speakers brings to mind Ayn Rand's famous novel. But this movie is actually based on a Japanese novel. The movie is about a company that has bought up all this land in the country to build resort houses for rich people from Tokyo. The villas are using up all the water from a local reservoir, which leads to conflicts with the local farmers who have always used the water to irrigate their crops. A botanist becomes involved in the controversy when he decides to find an alternative water source. This plot thread is fairly interesting but it quickly gets pushed into he background by a love story that gets increasingly uninteresting as it goes on. And goes on it does. The movie is two hours and ten minutes which is way too long in this instance. The whole thing feels unfocused and dull. It's not a bad movie but it's just not particularly interesting.

Masaki Kobayashi drew down the number of main characters and expanded the narrative scope around his smaller cast for Fountainhead, in comparison to Beautiful Days. Instead of about six main characters, we're down to two, while also having enough story to comfortably fill 130 minutes of screen time. The problem is that in this first effort to expand the smaller characters into full-fledged film leads, I think Kobayashi and his screenwriter Zenzo Matsuyama didn't quite take the time they needed to ensure that all of the major elements were in proper balance across the story. As it is, subplots disappear for long stretches and an important third character who should be a major character is relegated to the sidelines for the first half of the film. Everything seems unbalanced, undermining the feeling of grand romance that the film is pretty obviously shooting for. Not to say that the film is a failure all around, but things simply don't hit like they should.

Ikushima (Keiji Sada) is a young botanist working for a university professor who visits a remote part of Japan where a company owned by a member of the former Japanese royal system (he's described as a former earl) Tachibana (Shin Saburi) has built some villas for rich residents of the city to come and relax. This has created friction with the local farmers who are essentially subsistence farming rice and need access to Tachibana's water to irrigate their plans for larger rice fields. This almost feels like a very early John Ford western or even Shane. Ikushima is just there to help his boss get through a talk, but he gets invested in the plight of the farmers and agrees to do an amateur survey of the area to find a potential alternate water source. In order to get permission, he goes to Tachibana's secretary, the young and pretty Motoko (Ineko Arima). The movie's first, and most major, failing is the opening of the relationship between Motoko and Ikushima. They end up deeply in love, but the ramp up to it is really poorly defined. The early parts of the film are really dominated by the mechanics of the villa vs. Villager conflict as well as the complex relationship Tachibana has with Motoko, tied to Tachibana's never-seen wife.

Tachibana still loves his wife even though she cheated on him with another man. They're separated, and, one night while he's alone with Motoko, he shows her the shotgun that he almost killed his wife with. He then orders her to lock them into a bedroom together (with the gun on the other side of the house), putting himself into a situation where temptation will overcome him. She climbs into the bed at his orders, and just as he's going to break down, he leaves the room and kills himself with the gun. And then we find out that Ikushima's friends are trying to set him up with a young woman, plainer than Motoko, Kuniko (Yoko Katsuragi). They met once at a botanical garden two years before. Ikushima does not remember, but Kuniko has borderline obsessed over him ever since.

Kuniko is the other major issue with the film. She's in one scene in the first half of the film where she doesn't say a word, and she ends up dominating about a twenty-minute segment towards the end. This segment comes because Ikushima and Motoko have a love affair defined by their inability to not be together for somewhat strained reasons about how being together and in love will only make them unhappy, so Ikushima ends up trending towards Kuniko instead.

I think the movie is essentially two stories that never got integrated well. The first is the sort of thing that feels more at home with Kobayashi, the story of an underdog facing off with more powerful institutional foes as manifested by the villagers versus the villa owners. Ikushima decided to help the one side while Tachibana barely knows what going on with his land, pushing off the management to the unscrupulous manager (Daisuke Kato) who hires Motoko to be his personal secretary with an open offer to become his kept woman and mistress. The second is this romantic triangle (well, there is a fourth entry into the potential love interests, but his role is honestly too small to count) between Ikushima, Motoko, and Kuniko. Kuniko is introduced way too late for her part of the story to carry any weight, and the roman between Ikushima and Motoko is too poorly established early and then too dominated by twisting logic about why two people who love each other can never be together for amorphous emotional reasons to fit either. I blame, to some degree, the structure of the film.

The first and final parts of the film are dominated by the conflict between the villagers and the villa owners, and the middle hour or so is dominated by the love triangle. In fact, there's a large section where the water rights issue is never brought up, and I wondered if the film had simply forgotten about it. The love triangle feels completely disconnected from the water rights subplot, and vice versa. I can't even really figure out how they connect thematically.

Now, having harped on that disconnect long enough, I need to focus on some of the film's many positive qualities. Much like all of his other work, Kobayashi has a wonderful ability to coax good performances from his actors. From Sada's limp right arm in the role to his anguish over his love situation to Arima's sexy performance as a woman who knows exactly what she wants and Katsuragi's lovelorn state, the performances are uniformly excellent. The individual subplot of the water rights are handled well enough and could maintain their own movie if Kobayashi hadn't seemingly felt the need to fit the film in with the more mainstream dramatic fare of contemporary Japanese popular cinema (that would seemingly change after he finally got to release his earlier film The Thick-Walled Room the same year).

So, it ends up a mixed experience. He made a film bursting with narrative movement but couldn't connect it all. He had managed that in a different way in his previous handful of films, but Fountainhead was a new kind of ambitious that he couldn't quite match. It seems to prelude the brand of ambition he would demonstrate to much greater effect later in films like The Human Condition and Hara-kiri. However, here, it's not all that successful.

Because of the low IMDB rating compared to other films by the director my expectations were low, however this changed to a pleasant surprise. The film began and ended in a rural setting, and the middle section was urban. Likewise, the middle section centered more on the romantic lives of the main characters, whereas the bookends were somewhat more focused on water rights issues and the conflict between the rural people and developers. The performances were quite good, particularly Ineko Arima. The camera loved her, and dwelled on her often. Like many Japanese films, the emotions expressed were quite genuine and powerful, yet subtle. I really love finding these hidden gem-like underappreciated films! My only criticism is that the film seemed at times like it was edited down from something a bit longer. Several scenes seemed like the ends were cut a bit too abruptly, and then sometimes even the same person would just suddenly be elsewhere. It would be fascinating to ask the director or editor what happened, but alas this will not be. Just give more minutes of footage might have corrected this. However I highly recommend this film!

No one could ever accuse Kobayashi Masaki of insincerity. Even his medium-length 'Youth of the son,' which felt like a 1950s TV sitcom, bore some nice storytelling and themes amidst its cheerfulness. Yet even as Kobayashi joins the fine company of contemporary Kurosawa Akira in having directed some of the greatest films ever made, he also shares the distinction of not necessarily having a flawless record. It's certainly not that this 1956 movie is outright bad, for it's duly well made and acted, with interesting story threads, themes, and ideas. However, both on paper and in realization the plot has been rendered far more than not as a gaudy melodrama that would fit right in with the modern soap operas of daytime television. The strength of the viewing experience is sapped away as judicious, meaningful storytelling is overtaken by grandiose flourishes, and by shaky scene writing, characterizations, and plot development of gauchely heightened dramatic inclinations that will satisfy the bored housewife more than the avid cinephile or ardent consumer of fiction. No, 'Fountainhead' isn't bad, but nor is it really convincing.

Two halves of the feature more or less dovetail into each other as the greed and amoral indifference of the wealthy, powerful, and corporate, controlling and recklessly exploiting precious water resources, are intertwined with dollops of romance and interpersonal drama. We have the wealthy businessman who has unhealthy relationships with women, and his extra smarmy business partners who are even worse regarding any considerations for other people and their concerns. There's the young scientist who demonstrates earnest interest in exploring new sources of water, who is also kind of boorish, sexist, and quick to anger in his naive attitudes toward women. There's the young lady who hopelessly pines for that scientist, and another for whom the scientist yearns but is caught in the midst of all these other individuals and her own ambitions. These and others are all notions worth teasing out in a picture. All of them put together with the noted sensibilities becomes tiring rather quickly, not least with an overall flat tone, discrete moments of amplified emotional emphasis, and a score that swells sensationally at all those same discrete moments. The narrative is genuinely compelling in and of itself, and some odds and ends are particularly brilliant even in the dialogue - yet the details that round that narrative, and the manner in which it was realized, make the feature uneven and imbalanced, like a disc or cylinder spinning when its weight is not evenly distributed.

Kinoshita Chuji's music is nice in and of itself, but the fashion in which it is employed is overbearing. The sets are fantastic and rich with detail, and the filing locations are lovely; the costume design, hair, and makeup are sharp. I appreciate the cinematography. Of everything in these two hours, I believe it's the acting that is strongest of all as the cast give performances of personality, range, nuance, and emotional depth. And to be sure, Kobayashi's direction is technically competent. Yet his skills here seem unskilled if not altogether unpracticed as 'Fountainhead' struggles with tone, and with the fundamental dispensation of plot. Just as some bits and bobs are especially well done, between the writing, Kobayashi's oversight and guidance as director, the sequencing and editing, and the music, other bits and bobs almost inspire laughter for how poorly they are executed. There is value in this title, but it's a regrettable hodgepodge that sometimes comes close to achieving something great, but never actually does. Rather accentuating the point, as events of all stripes come to a head in the last twenty to thirty minutes, not only does the sum total not improve, but I quite wonder if the storytelling doesn't falter even more. That formative plot idea of water rights just silently slips away into a tertiary matter until it suddenly roars back in the last stretch, and in so doing comes across not as a shift in focus but as outright neglect as a storyteller. Through to the end other narrative ideas suffer a similar fate, unnaturally coming and going, and the final scenes seem downright flimsy to me. Admirable themes are at last struck upon, perhaps - but at that point, so what?

I don't fully dislike this film. Whether true or not, however, it comes across as the product of a difficult time in Kobayashi's life, when the utmost mastery he demonstrated at his best was peculiarly diminished owing to unknown factors. Suitable ideas and generally fine craftsmanship flounder as they present, and I'm left unimpressed. I'm not saying that 'Fountainhead' isn't deserving in some measure; I am saying that it's a pale shade of what the filmmaker was capable of, and unless you have some special impetus to watch, this isn't something that specifically demands viewership.