Kaneto Shindo is, at 99, the oldest film director in Japan and, after Portugal's centenarian Manoel de Oliveira, the world. As a scriptwriter active since the 1930s, he has worked on many commercial films, but as a director, starting in 1951 with "Aisai Monogatari (Story of a Beloved Wife)," he has taken a more independent path. The human price of war has been a frequent theme, from his 1952 triumph "Genbaku no Ko (Children of Hiroshima)" to his latest film, the World War II home-front drama "Ichimai no Hagaki (Post Card)," which he also called his last when it won the Special Jury Prize at last year's Tokyo International Film Festival.
Whether or not "Post Card" is indeed the "last," it is by a filmmaker still passionate about his subject, still trying to provoke his audience. While not likely to be mistaken for the work of a young man, it is also not a geriatric shuffle through the attic of memory. In fact, it has a striking relevance to the present moment, with a plucky heroine forced to restart her life after everything collapses around her.
She is Tomoko (Shinobu Otake), whose rough-hewn but loving farmer husband, Sadazo (Naomasa Musaka), is drafted into the army, leaving her to care for his aged parents (Akira Emoto and Mitsuko Baisho). Through a series of disasters I won't detail, she finds herself widowed twice and alone at the end of the war, when she receives a visitor: Sadazo's former comrade, Keita (Etsushi Toyokawa).