Gaijin - Love me the Way I Am (Gaijin - Ama-Me Como Sou) Tizuka Yamasaki Brazil 2005
Tizuka Yamasaki’s film Gaijin - Ama-Me Como Sou (Gaijin - Love Me as I am) is a melodramatic saga depicting a century of Japanese life in Brazil through the fortunes of three generations of an immigrant family. Everything that could befall matriarch Titoe’s family occurs: the hardships of colonizing the wilderness, the difficulties of adjusting to life in the Americas and preserving their own language and way of life, the difficulties provoked by the Second World War (in which Brazil aligned with the Allies), and one of the daughters marrying a white man - the Gaijin (or foreigner) of the title. The tale twists when, due to Brazil’s economic meltdown under President Collor in the late 1980s, the family ends up, (Gaijin included) moving back to Japan in search of the wealth and prosperity they had once sought in Brazil, and thus becoming Gaijin themselves.
Gaijin is soap operatic in the ‘best’, overblown Brazilian tradition. There are betrayals, killings, outrageous reversals of fortune and incredible coincidences and twists of fate. And a whole lot of shouting, naturally. Not being a soap opera fan I found most of the film to be trite and not a little bit cheesy, especially the bombastic acting and syrupy soundtrack. The Brazilian audience I was watching with, however, seemed to enjoy themselves greatly. It certainly swept the board here at Gramado, winning best picture and best director. One of the nicer touches in the film is that characters speak to other native speakers in their own language. The Japanese communicate in Japanese, German immigrants in German, Italians in Italian, and so on. When they cross communicate they speak heavily accented Portuguese, which becomes regular Brazilian Portuguese with the branching down of the generations. This betokens a respect for the experience of immigration in Brazil. And it is true that all the situations faced by the family are extremely plausible. Situations such as the backlash against the Japanese during the Second World War and the difficulties of Japanese Brazilians returning to their home country as scorned economic migrants are worthy of treatment. Maybe using the cheesy soap opera format was a deliberate tactic to recount a perhaps unfamiliar narrative in a recognizable form, to open to the whole of Brazil a story that could have been seen by the average cinema-goer as relevant only to one ethnic group. Maybe so. It certainly worked well with the audience I saw the film with. The only problem with this is that, whilst the telenovela is very accessible and very Brazilian, it is also very, very, very bad. For me this left Gaijin – Ama-Me Como Sou as thematically interesting but narratively over-egged and far too hammed up, resulting in a high cholesterol breakfast of a film. A worthy watch, but, for me at least, a queasy one overall.
