LEONIE IS A BIOPIC OF THE WOMAN WHO MADE 2 JAPANESE MEN FAMOUS
After graduating from Bryn Mawr, Leonie Gilmour (played by Emily Mortimer) applies for the job of editor for the poet Yone Noguchi (played by Shidô Nakamura) in New York and is hired. Yone soon declares his love, and she becomes pregnant with their son, the future Isamu Noguchi (played as an adult by Jan Milligan). But when the Russo-Japanese War begins in 1895, newspaper coverage about the “Yellow Peril” prompts someone to slug Yone, whereupon he returns to Japan for safety, abandoning his pregnant wife, who first visits her mother in Pasadena, California, learns of new state laws that will adversely affect her son, and then goes to Japan to reunite son with father. But the taboos of Japanese culture frustrate her, not just on the street as a white person. Applying to teach at the first university in Japan for women, she is turned down because she is not “conservative” enough and instead is a tutor to Japanese who want to keep up their English with conversation. When Leonie discovers that Yone has a Japanese wife, she leaves the house that he provides for her. But Isamu’s son is bullied by Japanese at school for being part-American, so she takes her son to live in a new house to be built elsewhere, where he learns carpentry skills from the workers, which in time develop into his extraordinary talent for art and architecture. Earlier, after having sex with one of Leonie’s students, she gives birth to a daughter, but he is culturally restricted from assuming a paternal role. In time, Leonie and her children go to America. Thus, the biopic, directed by Hisaki Matsui, is about Leonie the vagabond, who shaped the two Noguchis to greatness but lived a happy life because she was a free spirit. Titles at the end provide details about when she and the Noguchis died. Japanese scenes are breathtaking, combining artistic elegance inside homes to relate to the beauty outside. Still photos of several Isamu’s architectural masterpieces also appear at the end of the film. MH