A waste of 90 minutes of my life

Instead, you get a movie that's enjoyable enough, but leaves you feeling like it could have been much, much more.

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

After watching the superb French Neo-Noir The Connection,I started looking for other titles about to go from Netflix UK. Recently keeping a look out for unique movies from Asia,I stumbled on a landmark Asian American work,which led to me taking a photo.The plot-Japan 1918:After the death of her dad,Riyo's aunt makes arrangements for her to be a "picture bride",where a marriage is arranged via exchanging of photos. Shown a photo of hunky Matsuji,Riyo agrees to the wedding. Leaving Japan for a plantation field in Hawaii,Riyo gets set to meet handsome Matsuji. Meeting Matsuji,Riyo is shocked to discover a less than picture perfect likeness. View on the film:Given the film a much needed moment of lightness, Toshirô Mifune gives a very funny performance as The Benshi in his penultimate role,which gives cheeky nods to his Kurosawa work. Drained of any hope when she meets Matsuji for the first time, Youki Kudoh gives an exquisite performance as Riyo,with Riyo's painful desire to escape being one that Matsuji expresses with a simmering murmur and a cold shoulder towards Matsuji (played by a terrific Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa.) Painting her debut,co-writer/(with Diane Mei Lin Mark & Mari Hatta) director Kayo Hatta (who drowned in 2005) and cinematographer Claudio Rocha give Riyo's pain a strikingly lyrical quality,via the weaving of songs and sounds of moving plants giving the title an oddly supernatural atmosphere. Largely holding back from big melodrama scenes,Hatta gets under the relationship of Riyo and Matsuji by stiltedly going round the plantation in picture perfect shots.

This is a Japanese film but there is quite a bit of English also spoken in here. It's a pretty film, with nice visuals, featuring the scenic beauty of Hawaii.However, that was the only redeeming quality for me. The story was generally boring. Who wants to watch a young woman sulk for 90 percent of the film because her "picture" husband is a lot older than he advertised he was? Granted, that could be a bummer......but get over it!Only in the last 10 minutes does she do an about-face and become fond of him. By then, for most viewers, it was too little-too late. We'd fallen asleep by then.

Picture Bride paints a realistic and moving portrait of what it must have been like for Japanese men brought to Hawaii at the turn of the 19th Century to work in the sugar cane fields. Most came planning to return to their homeland, but few were ever able to do so. Equally movingly portrayed is the fate of Japanese women, some as young as fifteen or sixteen, who were sent as promised brides to men they knew only through photographs that often were 10 or 15-years out of date, or were of some other younger man. They too worked long hard hours in the fields, while fighting homesickness and to preserve their dignity.Director Hatta's portrayal of one picture bride's courage and perseverance struggling to survive in a strange land and alien society under great physical duress, is, ultimately, inspirational and uplifting--a story of moral and cultural survival. There is a grandness and magnificence of sweep of character and landscape in Picture Bride that captures the alluring beauty as well as violent harshness of colonial Hawaii. This is a film that is emotionally, intellectually and artistically rewarding.

The first time I saw PICTURE BRIDE, I felt a bit let down, feeling the story was a bit commonplace. Also, being from Hawaii, I felt the petty impulse to begrudge the few (very few) slightly misleading geographical and historical moments in the film. Now, five years later, I like the movie better. Its cinematography is beautiful, and if the plot is sometimes predictable, it's still handled sensitively. The film leaves you with a strong sense of a time and setting that no longer exists.