With Beauty and Sorrow
dir. Masahiro Shinoda · 1965
The complexities of love and loss can shape our identities and relationships in profound and often painful ways.
A chance meeting in Kyoto stirs long-buried emotions between Ôki, a celebrated writer, and Otoko, a renowned painter, whose shared past is marred by tragedy. As their lives intertwine once more, the specter of lost love and unresolved trauma looms large, revealing the depths of their artistic obsessions and the lengths to which one will go for revenge.
Long before the events of the movie Ôki, who was approaching middle age, had a relation to 16-year-old Otoko. She got pregnant, but the child was stillborn. Their relation stopped at the same time. Much later Ôki had become a famous writer, not least because of a novel about this love story. Otoko had become a famous painter. But she had never overcome the double early trauma and had become a Lesbian. Her favourite student and beloved one was the beautiful Keiko. 24 years after the early love Ôki goes from Tokyo to Kyoto to meet Otoko. The meeting is polite with secret emotional shadows. Keiko makes a plan. She intends to seduce Ôki, become pregnant, bear Ôki's child and give it to Otoko. She hopes that Otoko may thereby get rid of her trauma. But she also wants to take her revenge on the man who had harmed her beloved. Secretly she gets acquainted with Ôki's son, invites him to Kyoto and seduces him. Then she calls his parents and tells that he had promised to marry her. Horrified they take the first plane to Kyoto. Meanwhile, she takes the son on boating, arranges an accident, and drowns him. It is close that she herself would also die.
