Oriental Antonioni

She and He. Far too much of Japan's exported celluloid is allocated to films of the nation's vanished grandeur--to the gaudy excesses of feudal overlords, the violent, formalized courage of the Samurai. She and He is one of a handful of recent exceptions.

In a sterile suburb of Tokyo, a couple, not quite young, not yet old, lives in a stereotyped housing development. Childless and friendless, they also become, in effect, anonymous, merely "she" and "he." Then "she" suddenly awakens to the universe outside her door. Alongside the development lives a colony of bedraggled ragpickers who subsist on the refuse of their privileged neighbors. One of them "she" recognizes as her husband's college classmate. "She" befriends him and his blind ward, a little girl whose wild, wandering eyes make her a creature of special desperation. Embarrassed by the fall of his onetime classmate, "he" crushes the few hesitant attempts of the ragpicker and his wife to create a friendship.

Devoid of sexual passion, a corporate creature whose work is his life, "he" becomes the Oriental equivalent of the passive Antonioni villain. In the end, "she" and "he" lie side by side in bed, untouching, distant relatives by marriage; their bleak lives infinitely poorer than those of their impoverished neighbors.

Told in vignettes as agile and fragile as haiku, She and He lacks the substance of genuine tragedy, but Director Susumu Hani, a onetime documentary film maker, has given the picture a sense of on-location authenticity that transcends its simplistic symbolism. His casting, an amalgam of amateur and professional actors, is flawless. The blind girl literally lives her role; she is truly blind. The ragpicker (Sachiko Hidari), a painter who never acted before, is as narrow as a rice stalk, so emaciated that he sometimes seems to have two profiles in search of a face. But Hidari radiates a beggar's joie de vivre, in contrast to the boredom of the well-to-do. Thus he underlines the film's theme: in present-day privileged society, the cost of the good life is charged to the spirit.

She and He is likely to win more friends for its director and cast than for itself. Nevertheless, by confronting--if not embracing--the present, the movie indicates that the themes of Japanese film makers are catching up with their extraordinary pictorial facility.

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