Come See the Paradise

Alan Parker, USA, 1990, 138 minutes

Come see the Paradise is a remarkably ambitious movie. Possibly too ambitious. It deals with several themes which could make fascinating films in themselves: 1930s labour wars; the Japanese community in America and the ensuing clash of cultures; an inter-racial love story and the internment of the Japanese during the war.

Dramatically, it is the love story which dominates. The lovers are an Irish-American union activist played by Dennis Quaid and a second generation Japanese-American from a prosperous family played by Tamilyn Tomita. Like Romeo and Juliet they seem to hit it off in under ten seconds (who needs flirting and courting?). Also like Romeo and Juliet the racial and cultural divide between them suggests things won't be too easy with the in-laws. "Get yourself a nice white girl", Quaid's character is advised.

Quaid's brother accuses him of being a "red" . The justification which Quaid makes for trade unionism during the ensuing fight is pretty simple stuff and the capitalists we see in the film are uniformly pretty nasty bits of work exploiting the proletariat with abandon. The important and fascinating aspect of the film is the revelations which it makes about the internment of Japanese in America after Pearl Harbour. Why is it that there were German-Americans and Italian-Americans in the war in Europe and yet Japanese-Americans were held and put into detention camps, their loyalties to the state questioned? Why were the Japanese denied American citizenship? Why has this information remained such a secret? For this reason Come See The Paradise deserves a much wider audience than the limited cinema release it received in Britain.

Review by Michael Morrison
Taken from EUFS Programme 1992-93