STRAWBERRY FIELDS
Reviewed by Harvey Karten, Ph.D. Open City Films Director: Rea Tajiri Writer: Kerri Sakamoto, Rea Tajiri Cast:Susie Nakamura, Suzy Makamura, James Sie, Chris Tahsima, Marilyn Tokuda
The U.S. has a history of paranoia dating back at least to the Salem Witch trials, occurrences which have included McCarthyism, the 1920s anti-communist purges, and the belief that a Communist Vietnam would lead to the "fall" of all of Asia as though the nations of that vast continent were little more than a stack of dominoes. Looking back now to the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942 in California camps, we can readily see how absurd, even unconstitutional, it was to single out this ethnic group as though they were spies and saboteurs for Imperial Japan. While that shameful incident occurred fifty-six years ago, some American people are still suffering under the weight of that chagrin, and not all of them were old enough to have been placed in those military quarters. Even teenagers today, a group considered anything but political, can feel its effects. The impact can be magnified depending on the climate of the times. Teens during the late 1960s and early 1970s were indeed more politically motivated than they are today, living through a chaotic time of America's involvement in the Vietnam War.
Take Irene Kawai (Suzy Nakamura), age sixteen in the year 1971, a troubled adolescent from a dysfunctional family and the principal character of Rea Tajiri's film "Strawberry Fields." When her kid sister suddenly dies, she is traumatized, the death understandably affecting the relations between her mother and father as well. Her emotional condition is not eased in school, where her classmates think nothing of calling Asian people by pejorative names and where at least one kid in her class proclaims "the only good gook is a dead gook."
To top things off, before her death her sister had found a picture in her mother's closet of a building in one of those 1940s internment camps, and Irene learns that this is where her mother and her grandfather were incarcerated during World War II. Believing that her distressed feelings could be lessened if she could visit the site, she takes off with a hippie friend to visit the location, only to discover that it is vast wasteland, a western desert which may conjure up images of Butch Cassidy to some Americans, of depressing Indian reservations to others, and of freedom from claustrophobic conditions back home to still additional people. Consciously or not, Irene may have made the trip principally to get away from home, but to her knowledge it was strictly to seek her roots.
The film is a personal one based on director Rea Tajiri's own background as a kid, and features a recurring image of fire. We grasp from the opening scenes of the 86-minute work that Irene's grandfather had burned his possessions, principally to prevent the FBI from finding any evidence that could link him in any way to his roots in the Japanese archipelago. Irene burns books of matches in the bathtub; in one episode she throws matches at a woman who is walking in front of her, minding her own business; and her nightmares and daydreams are filled with repetitive reflections of fire, as though to symbolize a holocaust. She engages in a sexually active, love-hate relationship with a handsome boy friend who is frequently on the verge of walking away during her tantrums. In one episode that brought occasional laughs from the audience--probably inappropriate guffaws--she listens to haphazard singing from a woman who is a friend of Irene's friend, who links up with the traveling party and points out the locations in the internment area of the drama class, the police station, and the Buddha.
Ms. Nakamura turns in an impassioned role as the troubled teen but the film is frequently frustrating. It fails to show how her grandfather's fate is connected to Irene's high-strung behavior. What comes across, really, is that her frequently yelling, her breaking objects and tossing them around the room, her playing with matches, is little more than typically adolescent rebellion furthered by her understandable depression at the loss of her younger sister. The repetition of images, particularly of fire (which appears in her mind at least thirty times during the movie) and of the ghost of her sister, is irritating. While the non-narrative format is a reasonable enough choice given the nature of the plot (a disturbed girl seeking solace), "Strawberry Fields" is particularly disjointed, for the most part failing to connect the unfortunate domestic developments of wartime U.S. with the young woman's dilemma.
This is director Rea Tajiri's first feature film. She had been heretofore known as an award-winning videomaker whose "History and Memory" transposing personal stories against what she considers a flawed conventional approach to documenting the past. "Strawberry Fields" was shown in New York City as part of the 21st Asian-American International Film Festival.
Not Rated. Running time: 86 minutes. (C) Harvey Karten 1998
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