The Films of Mikio Naruse
by Dan Sallitt
This blurbs were written
during the Mikio Naruse festival at Film Forum in New York in Oct-Nov 2005,
and originally posted on the Yahoo group a_film_by and
the Google group NaruseRetro. Some of them are slightly revised,
with additional material interpolated. Apologies for the variations
in length and detail.
Flunky, Work Hard! (1931). Rather a nice little film, an O. Henry-like
vignette that feels complete at 38 minutes. Naruse seems to be working
out of Ozu's universe here: the film lacks his usual storytelling sprawl,
though we get some of his visual gravity and his bleak vision of family
and poverty. The physical humor is often deft (there's a very funny
gag where the mother's compulsive sweeping threatens an infant lying on
the floor), but the film peaks with the harsh scene of the father's unjust
punishment of his son, ending in a beautiful long shot of the crying boy's
retreat through a sunny field. Naruse is already punching up the story
with camera moves and effects, but not as continuously as he would in a few
years: the camera style remains calm until the plot takes an emotional turn.
Not Blood Relations (1932). One of my least favorite Naruse
films, mostly because I don't enjoy this sort of prolong-the-agony plot.
But I don't think that Naruse obtained any kind of unusual perspective
on the goings-on, and the characters stayed close to their archetypes. His
very busy camera style of this period gives the film a nice, lively feel -
I think that its principal effect is to give Naruse more control of emphasis,
rather than to give us a spatial perspective. Many good directors seem
to have felt a need to combat the tyranny of the diegesis in silent films,
and then settled down in the more contrapuntal environment of the talkies.
Apart From You (1933). A disciplined melodrama that perhaps
doesn't get as far under the surface of its characters as one would like.
Of the three leads, only the young geisha played by Sumiko Mizukubo
develops any complexity (her bitter confrontation with her unpleasant family
is quite good), and, even so, her emotional location in the final scenes
becomes obscure to me. Whereas the character of the boy simply flips
from delinquency to goodness without much exploration at all. (Akio
Isono looked about 45 years old in that schoolboy outfit and Ish Kabibble
haircut, which was a distraction.) The wild camera style that Naruse
liked in this period is here refined into a reliance on dollies in and out,
though the effect is approximately the same: a way to distribute emphasis
that is not beholden to story. The appealing settings in the middle
of the film - an evocative train ride, the seaside location of the girl's
family home - establish an idyllic mood, but the darker melodrama of the
climax doesn't build from it: Mizukubo's final decision didn't seem to have
a lot to do the knifing and recovery that came before; and the dynamic of
leaving/staying hadn't been important in the film until that point. By the
end I had trouble remembering the good will that the film had built up earlier.
Every Night Dreams (1933). A slow-building film that pays
off with a powerful ending. Naruse's hyperkinetic camera style
pumps up the melodrama of rejected husband Saito trying to make good on
his second chance with his estranged wife Kurishima and his daughter. But
the characterization of the husband is too balanced to be the stuff of melodrama:
his terminal weakness and fickleness is presented as clearly as his childlike
gentleness and sincerity. Only when the overwrought plot reaches
its climax do we realize that Kurishima's melodrama diverges from ours:
even in death, Saito evokes in her not pathos, but fury and contempt. Naruse's
devious approach to the emotional material, honoring its form but not its
expected redemptive function, foreshadows the storytelling techniques that
he would hone in the 50s.
Street Without End (1934). A relatively conventional story,
filmed with assurance by Naruse, and helped by an appealingly restrained
lead performance from Setsuko Shinobu. The vigorous, eclectic camera
style works through, not around, the drama, giving the impression that Naruse
is completely engaged with the material. Even so, the film never develops
the narrative complexity that is his specialty. Though Naruse doesn't
do enough with Shinobu's participation in the death of her hapless husband,
he scores big with the final scene, which returns to the opening visual
theme of city chaos to amplify Shinobu's lingering sense of loss from an
earlier relationship.
Three Sisters With Maiden Hearts (1935). A fascinating film,
so visually dense and languorous that the characters seem suspended in dreamlike
stasis. From the opening shots, Naruse shows the titular sisters immersed
in a profusion of street detail; though some of the footage is semi-documentary,
the cumulative effect is abstract, almost Sternbergian. The revelations
of the sisters unfold slowly, punctuated by flashbacks (weirdly bracketed
by focus-outs and focus-ins) and narrated in a state of revery. When
a plot kicks in near the end, it is outrageously melodramatic and not very
effective in illuminating the characters' lives - though the last line of
dialogue hints that the middle sister's sacrifice may have been an unusual
form of suicide. Undeniably impressive, on the edge of being lugubrious,
the film makes me wish it were more plotted or less
plotted.
Wife! Be Like a Rose (1935). Something different for Naruse,
but quite a nice film. It starts a little flip and goofy, but falls
into an interesting, contemplative state, without a lot of incident or drama.
In a way, it's almost the record of someone making up their mind, with
imagery and landscape as visual aids to the decision-making process, and the
story an experiment to gather data. It's perhaps Naruse's most Ozu-like
film, but the ending, if not exactly a kicker, points up a Darwinian undertone
that gives the gentle story some bite: sorry, Mom, you were weighed in the
balance and found wanting.
Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro (1938). A competent comedy-drama that gives
Naruse no opportunity to do anything interesting. The stylized pattern
of quarrel and reconciliation between the two leads seems particularly inappropriate
for a director whose vision of conflict is far more pervasive and entropic.
Though he can do little with the characters, Naruse shoots the musical
numbers beautifully, favoring low angles and spacious backgrounds, and
giving the film a sense of drama by cutting to the stage at odd times and
sustaining the tension of the performances with long takes.
The Whole Family Works (1939). Not too ambitious, but rather
a nice film, full of dark character observations that are well integrated
into a light comic tone. (I especially like the conflict between the
casually venal mother and the diligent fourth son, who spends his savings
rather than let his parents "borrow" them again.) An irresolvable conflict
emerges - the children can escape lives of grinding poverty only by leaving
the rest of the family in the direst of straits - and is played out to its
grim conclusion. Unfortunately, the final section is defaced by the
intervention of the children's gasbag teacher, whose function seems to be
to give the story a phony tone of resolution and optimism. Is this
the hand of censorship? At any rate, Naruse managed to sneak in a
final, desolating shot of the parents, presumably looking starvation in
the face now that their children have been liberated.
Travelling Actors (1940). An uncanny film that seems much
better in retrospect than it did when it was in progress. Early on,
we realize not only that the story is predicated on a single joke - the excessive
identification of the protagonists with their equine acting persona - but
also that this conceit is an abstraction that inhibits any deep study of
character. Despite the narrowness of the psychology, Naruse pulls humor from
small, realistic interactions, and the country atmosphere is a strong presence.
(There's a beautiful, leisurely sequence in which the rejected actors wander
through a series of pastoral long shots on their disgruntled way to the
river - John Ford couldn't have struck a better balance between the timeless
appeal of landscape and the melancholy of the human drama enclosed in the
vastness of space.) The ending is transformative: the narrowness of
the characterizations is acknowledged and amplified into absurdism, as the
funny horse suit triumphantly leaves the confines of the theater and claims
the expansive landscape for its own. Paradoxically, the crazy ending
makes the film feel like a deeper study of people: one imagines that Renoir
or Boris Barnet would have liked to have made this film.
The Song Lantern (1943). Painfully circumscribed by the
mythic characters and the period setting, Naruse falls back on pictorialism.
Some of the lighting effects are truly striking, but nonetheless the
film just sits there. Yamada's two dance scenes, filmed with drama and an
interesting sense of space (Naruse lets Yamada crowd the camera more tham
was his wont) are the highlights.
Tale of the Archery at Sanjusangendo (1945). Another period
piece, with legendary characters and vaguely martial overtones. The
script has some wit, and the screenwriter makes a small effort to give the
characters dimension, but there's really not much that Naruse can do with
this material, other that create beautiful deep-space compositions for the
exterior shots. Occasionally a small mysterious moment is created
by duration and editing rhythm, but the characters are too thin to absorb
the mystery.
Ginza Cosmetics (1951). Not as original in concept as the
best Naruse films, but full of interesting texture. Tanaka is
excellent as the barmaid suspended between good-natured perseverence and
bitter practicality, and Naruse lets both of these aspects coexist in her
character without pushing either too hard. The bar scenes in the first
half are full of good detail and are often funny (there's an especially wonderful
moment where Tanaka busies herself lighting and smoking a cigarette to keep
herself from cracking up at an awful singer), and the dialogue is consistently
smart. When the plot kicks in, though, it doesn't give Naruse much room to
play storytelling games: the possibility of love rears its head and then departs
without revealing anything interesting about Tanaka's character. Despite
its considerable appeal, the film ends up feeling a bit unsatisfying.
Repast (1951). An affecting, contemplative film, unusually
specific to its locations (Osaka vs. Tokyo). Its theme is clearly stated
and never modified: from the opening voiceover, we are focused on the drudgery
of the married woman's life, and the work of the film is simply to make
us aware that, for Hara, this drudgery is not a secondary consideration,
that it outweighs all other factors in her happiness. Naruse uses sleight-of-hand
in the early scenes to make us think that Uehara's destructively flirtatious
niece is having a bad effect on the marriage, but before long Hara's essential
aversion to her role takes center stage again. (The scenes with the
niece don't work well for me: her cocktease is so blatant that I'd think
she would have either been thrown out or regarded as a laughing stock. Naruse
doesn't really give us a glimpse at the inner person, who I would presume
is sociopathically angry.) The film really kicks in during the drifting
Tokyo interlude, where the rhythm and mood convey Hara's sense of deliverance,
even as her well-meaning family and friends tighten the noose of marriage
around her neck. Hara's final voiceover almost seems to be playing
games with us, suggesting that "perhaps" the routine of marriage is the way
for women to be happy: surely the last scene with the couple shows her returning
to the same life that has already made her miserable.
Mother (1952). Even 60 minutes into the movie (around the time
of that startling false "The End" title), I was having trouble finding anything
distinguished in it: the levelled-out tone of sentimentality wasn't really
overdone, but neither did it seem very original, or at all typical of Naruse.
(The use of music and voiceover to create a level, retrospective mood feels
almost Fordian.) But near the end the pattern of characters dropping
away accelerated to the point of abstraction, and Naruse's empty angled interior
shots started looking ghostly. I thought of those war movies where
the platoon dwindles to a man or two by the end. Or, given that every major
character is eventually marked for an exit, including the mysteriously afflicted
Tanaka, maybe a better comparison is to vacated-center films like Point
Blank or These Are the Damned. The theme of duty is hit hard in Mother,
but Naruse characteristically (even subversively) lets a bleak psychological
vision creep around the edges of the surface celebration. I never
cared for this film before, but now I think I kind of like it.
Lightning (1952). The most perfect and moving of Naruse's family
dramas. Takamine's rebellious daughter, a bus tour conductor whose
perky descriptions of tourist sites are humorously presented as non-diegetic,
is immersed in one of Naruse's most interestingly destructive families,
shot through with masochistic self-abnegation as well as the usual reflexive
predation. Relatively level-headed and with just enough anger to keep her
emotionally distant from the family quagmire, Takamine reaches out, first
tentatively and then decisively, toward anything that evokes the culture
and tranquility that she has never known. Naruse's most exciting climactic
"kicker" is in fact a double kicker: after an outburst at her trapped mother
that reveals only the depths of Takamine's despair, a quiet barrage of
lightning heralds a new, inner narrative of optimism that Takamine gradually
succeeds in imposing on the film at large. The last line, an unexpected
gift to our intrepid heroine, sends the audience out with a feeling of hope
quite rare in Naruse's work.
Husband and Wife (1953). It still doesn't quite come together
for me, but it has its charms. It starts off with a light comedy tone,
a little like Wife (with Rentaro Mikuni adding broad humor in both
films). When the semi-humorous treatment of the husband's unjustified
jealousy turns into serious marital conflict, it has more bite than expected,
because blame-free wife Yoko Sugi has actually been subtly withholding affection
from the more obviously difficult Ken Uehara. Their reconcilation is
topped by a third-act conflict over whether to abort a pregnancy - not a
bad segment in itself, but seemingly imported from a different movie, as if
the drama were happening to a couple who hadn't had the conflict we saw earlier.
Unlike Wife, Husband and Wife doesn't have an ending
dark enough to stand as an antithesis to the comic conventions of the early
scenes. Probably not a major Naruse, all things considered.
Wife (1953). Still thinking about it, and liking it more
and more. It starts in a mode that's almost comic in its expressionist, subjective
vision of marital hostility (the exaggerations of the wife's disgusting habits,
complete with sound effects, reminded me of Sturges), but gradually amplifies
the difficult aspects of the situation, the ones that don't allow the film
to end like a comedy. And indeed it doesn't.... At first I thought the wife
was too unsympathetic for the film's own good, but now I think that that's
the most distinctive aspect of the project, and the one that pays the most
dividends.
Older Brother, Younger Sister (1953). A very good film - I
consider it top-drawer Naruse, and typical of his virtues, despite the unusual
rural setting. The film may be Naruse's most visually striking, with
lots of languorous long-shot deep-space interiors, charged with the threat
of conflict and the unnerving erotic presence of Kyo, supine and disruptive
in the summer heat. Two action scenes interrupt the leisurely drama
and spring the mechanism of Naruse's "hidden" story: Mori's fight with Kyo's
suitor, revealing his passion for the sister he abuses; then the climactic,
beautifully edited family brawl, in which Kyo's triumph is to express her
despair for the only time, and Mori's defeat is that his love is hidden by
violence and masculine pride. Just outside the older brother/younger
sister epicenter, all the other family members have their own crisis of degeneration
to deal with: the film is quite full of emotional material. There is
perhaps a small lull at the midpoint, when Kyo's impregnator pays an extended
visit.
Sound of the Mountain (1954). Unusual material for Naruse,
partly because of the hints of sexual perversity, but also because the story
is essentially told from the point of view of an observer (Yamamura), which
has the effect of hiding the details of the bad marriage and the husband's
affairs, giving us instead a pile of second-hand information. Naruse's
response to this complex material is more overtly poetic than usual: he
sometimes cuts directly to closeups where establishing shots are expected,
and often ends scenes with close shots that emphasize mystery instead of
giving information. One of the consequences of pinning the story to
Yamamura's perspective is that the film becomes a wide-ranging inquiry into
the lives of women at a moment in Japanese culture: not only daughter-in-law
Hara and daughter Nakakita (in whose hard luck Yamamura is implicated), but
also the dark underworld of Uehara's abused lovers, with Yoko Sugi playing
Heurtebise to Yamamura's Orpheus. The film has a mirror-image narrative
that is foreshadowed from the early scenes: that good-girl, childlike Hara,
far from waiting patiently for her husband to return to her, is silently
dedicated to a hatred that will unilaterally abort a pregnancy and terminate
the marriage. Though I liked the film much more than ever before,
the climax still feels unsatisfying to me, perhaps because Hara's decisive
actions occur off-camera and away from home. Naruse seems to be trying
to compensate for this absence by punching up Yamamura's encounter with
Uehara's pregnant lover, concealing her face until the last moment and giving
her an emotional turn that seems out of proportion to her dramatic importance.
But the evocative geometry of the last scene does a lot to make up
for any structural problems.
Late Chrysanthemums (1954). I like this film, sometimes
a lot, but I've always felt that it goes too far in the direction of plotlessness.
A lot of what I value about Naruse is his way of modifying conventional
dramatic structures so that they pay off differently than we expect, and
here that's not as much of an option. My favorite story strand is the relationship
between Chikako Hosokawa and her son: the boy clearly accepts and has learned
to have fun with his role as a delinquent, and the mother can't see him as
anything else - and yet he continually gives the mother money (not a common
occurence in this film), takes a difficult job to support her, and always
stares at her as if he's still seven years old and fascinated with her sexuality.
Characteristically, Naruse never underlines this mirror-image reinterpretation
of the mother-son relationship. The characterizations in general have
a lot of pleasing detail; I especially enjoyed Yuko Mochizuki as the most
boisterous and comic of the ex-geisha. The ending is suddenly emotional,
partly because big music cues have mostly been withheld until this point:
the penultimate shot of Sugimura anxiously searching for a ticket is quite
startling, the only point in the film where Naruse crystalizes our pity for
this extremely difficult (perhaps too difficult for my taste) person.
Floating Clouds (1955).
Just one of the most amazing of all films. I noticed this time how
very good the script by Yoko Mizuki (from Hayashi's novel, of course) is:
it takes a lot of planning to introduce so much melodrama and yet keep bringing
the film back to the same ostinato figures and slightly comic repetitions.
It took me a while to grasp
that the melodrama wasn't going to advance the story, that all Takamine's
bitter "last words" and Mori's retreats into the shadows are not to be taken
at face value. My take on the role of melodrama in these films
is that Naruse uses it to give the stories a dramatic structure that he
then hijacks for his own, non-melodramatic purposes. I think he needs
big drama the way that Hawks needs genre, as something that he uses to create
a set of expectations, which he will fulfill in an unexpected way. The development of these characters
is incredibly daring, almost absurdist, without announcing itself as such.
When you think about it, the lives of most couples fall into an existential
pattern - you're in love, you fall out of love, and then what happens for
the rest of your life? - that almost no other movies care to treat. Naruse
clearly outdoes himself here, moving through time and locations with an
ease that makes me think of The Searchers.
Sudden Rain (1956). I found this film perplexing, and not
entirely satisfying. The structure seems almost improvised, with the story
moving from patch to patch instead of weaving the different strands together:
I was especially perturbed when a long interlude about the husband's work
life took over the film more than halfway through. The marital conflict in
the film is quite interesting: I especially liked the way Setsuko Hara presents
her familiar "ideal woman" persona to everyone but her husband, to whom
she is a bit of a shrew. But I had the feeling that some of the big scenes
and turning points weren't quite working, and that some aspects of the story
were underdeveloped.
A Wife's Heart (1956). Small, well-constructed, and really
quite good. We get a lot of subtext right off the bat, as the "happy"
Takamine-Kobayashi marriage functions on such a purely practical level that
its absences are conspicuous. When she finds love outside the marriage,
Takamine is so predisposed to snap that her husband's decisive demonstration
of decency does nothing but create a bitter sense of obligation in her. So
the conventional "marriage tested and restored" plot, complete with the hope
of financial success at the end, is actually a cover for a mirror-image
"happiness promised and withdrawn" emotional dynamic that is as fully worked
out as one could want. Takamine is very good, throwing in a particularly
nice impression of a stereotypical cheerful hostess in the restaurant scenes;
many directors would present such flexibility of self-presention as insincerity,
but Naruse always accepts it as natural and never underlines it. The
high-profile conflict over money with Kobayashi's family turns out to be
just a warm-up test for the couple, but it is one of Naruse's scariest depictions
of familial pressure.
Flowing (1956). This is probably my second favorite Naruse
after Floating Clouds (Editor's note: Lightning joined Floating
Clouds at the top of my Naruse list after this writing), but it doesn't
have the conceptual daring of the earlier film: it's more in the sneak-up-on-you
category than the what-the-hell-am-I-watching category. But it really sneaks
up: there are four separate characters (I would throw Sugimura in as a primary
along with Tanaka, Yamada and Takamine) whose inner lives are set into vibration,
and at the end they're all vibrating hard, so that every corner of the geisha
house seems to be leaking mystery. Takamine's character is especially
unusual: hard to the point of criminality (she almost certainly was intentionally
shortchanging the employees, causing much of the house's trouble), but ashamed
of her hardness because she identifies with the geisha tradition she rejected,
and therefore paralyzed in her life decisions. The beautifully lit samizen
jam at the end has great power: a new generation of geisha is in the wings,
and the calm and authority of the demonstration reaffirms the traditions
that give Yamada's life its meaning...but we know that things are falling
apart.
Anzukko (1958). A clearly told and compelling story, well within
Naruse's range of interests, and yet it somehow seems a bit thin, less behaviorally
dense than other "unhappy marriage" films. Perhaps the material is
not as congenial as it looks: unlike other dueling Naruse spouses, the embittered,
alcoholic husband is pretty much beyond the pale, incapable of putting
up a good social front for anyone; which means that Naruse loses the ability
to conceal the man's feelings behind routine behavior. The focus
shifts almost immediately from "Can they get along?" to "How long can she
take it?" More typically, the essentially sympathetic wife comes off
rather haughty and hurtful to her husband, seeming to relish striking at
his weak points. Not until the last scenes do we see the "zinger"
that Naruse is hinging the film upon: the question is not when the wife
will leave, but what hidden aspect of her nature keeps her in this marital
hell. But I wished that I was "zinged" earlier, because the marital
scenes inevitably become somewhat repetitive. Maybe a second viewing
will look different, after the revelation of the ending. In the important
role of the wife's father (object of the husband's jealousy), So Yamamura
is a little too amiable and full of poetic wisdom for my taste - I wish
he were a little more implicated in the problem. The father-daughter
relationship, as warm as it is, seems to work in complex, possibly damaging
ways in the daughter's mind - I feel as if this important side of the romantic
triangle could have been shown with a more analytical eye. A good
film, but I don't feel greatness in it very often.
Summer Clouds (1958). I enjoyed this film more the second
time around - I can't believe I thought it was too diffuse when I first saw
it, because this time it seemed if anything too well organized around its
theme, which is the passing of a patriarchal, family-centered way of life
and the onset of an individualistic ethos that dooms collective enterprises
like the family farm. I really enjoyed the early scenes with Nakamura,
who was equal parts oppressor and amiable grownup kid; and I was really struck
by the extreme but beautiful illuminated backgrounds in the romantic scenes
between Iwashima and Isao Kimura. About 75 minutes in, I started to
feel that the scenes were becoming verbal recapitulations of established
thematic points; and the ellipses in the last hour didn't keep me from feeling
that the theme was driving the characters. I was especially unconvinced
by Nakamura's sale of his land - and, in general, I felt that some tension
left the movie as that character's power ebbed. Once again, Naruse saves
his "kicker" for the final scene: Iwashima, whom we originally took for
a force of individualistic change, is actually old school, one of the dwindling
few who can be counted upon to sacrifice her happiness for the survival
of her (hated) community. As in Anzukko, it would take a subtle
eye to anticipate this kicker - I think Naruse wants these developments
to be partly foreshadowed and partly surprising. I think of the film
fondly, though not as an unqualified success.
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960). I do like this film,
but as hard as I try, I can't turn it into a major Naruse work in my mind.
The script doesn't seem to me quite as good as others Naruse has worked with,
with lots of explicit statements and restatements of things that maybe should
have been subtext. And something about the melodramatic structure just seems
too everyday, and too foregrounded by Naruse's decoupage, which relies on
cross-cutting between closeups, many of which are curiously held for an extra
beat. Still, Takamine is really quite good, very indirect, very moving -
she maintains her admirable composure while revealing fragments of anger,
and even whining need, at unannounced times.
Daughters, Wives, and a Mother (1960). This one got a lot
of love from some of the other Naruse regulars, but I was rather disappointed
in it. The script wasn't exactly bad, but it leaned on its themes a little
hard, especially the family's financial exploitation of Setsuko Hara. The
romantic interlude between Hara and Tatsuya Nakadai was one of the most generic
things I've seen in a Naruse film; Haruko Sugimura's devouring mom does everything
but get in a catfight with her daughter-in-law (though Naruse does give her
an interesting last scene); and Hideko Takamine waits in the wings for a
Lightning-like moment of truth that never really arrives. The structure
doesn't feel quite right to me: the money theme dominates three-fourths of
the film, then gives way near the end to a Make Way for Tomorrow-type
dilemma; and the surprise character revelation that Naruse uses so often is
saved for the last two shots of the film, and was inscrutable to me.
The Approach of Autumn (1960). I have a feeling I might
like this film a lot more if I ever get to see it again. It's mostly about
the lives of two young children, who are maybe not quite interesting enough
to carry the film, and one of whom (the girl) isn't a very good actor. But
the film has a simple, pure structure that Naruse makes work for him: I especially
liked the stereotypical long-suffering hard-working mom who is surreptitiously
revealed as a delinquent. The Scope photography is really good-looking,
and the sad ending sneaks up on you. Perhaps this is a major film disguised
as a throwaway project.
A Wanderer's Notebook (Her Lonely Lane) (1962). I can't find
a way into this movie. It manages to create a character for Hayashi,
but not much of a storytelling context: the focus remains on her stoicism
in the face of relentless poverty, and on the poetry of her voiceover commentary
on her struggles. Takamine's performance, though livened with comic
moments, mostly seems actorish to me, too devoted to impersonation. Characteristically,
Naruse gives only partial information about important character points:
Did Hayashi really sabotage her literary rival? Was her bad record
with relationships a character trait? But here the ambiguity doesn't
suggest alternative narratives. The film winds up mythologizing Hayashi
just by putting her so up front and center, and I'm not sure that mythologizing
suits Naruse.
Yearning (1964). I still think this is a good film, but
I'm trying to work out problems with it that I didn't perceive when I saw
it 20 years ago. The first half functions mostly as a setup, establishing
Takamine as the face of heroic, long-suffering Japanese womanhood, and Kayama
as a dissipate due to frustrated love, a familiar fictional archetype. (Matsuyama's
script repeats these formulations, and others, a few times too often - I
felt myself working a little too hard to overlook script flaws.) After
Kayama declares his love, Takamine's surface starts to crack, and her behavior
becomes erratic. The nasty family conflict, and all the business about
the death of small grocery stores, serve not only as a background for the
erosion of the fictional archetypes, but also as a slingshot to throw the
would-be lovers out onto that very nice train ride, where Takamine struggles
coyly to modify her faithful-wife persona to allow the possibility of yielding
to the persistent Kayama. But she has difficulty getting her persona
switched over to a new track. The ending isn't resolving well in my
mind: Takamine's freak-out at the kiss, and her subsequent regrets, work for
me in terms of psychology, but not as a turning point for the story. Why
does the steadfast Kayama take this glitch as a cue to give up and return
to dissipation, even with Takamine sending him encouraging signals over the
phone? It would make perfect sense, psychologically and structurally,
for the film to gradually show Kayama's dissipation as character-based rather
than as a response to romantic deprivation, but I feel that the film doesn't
devote as much effort to exposing Kayama's hidden character traits as it does
Takamine's. On balance, though, still a strong movie.
Scattered Clouds (1967). One of my favorite Naruse films.
Like Floating Clouds, it's a love story, and it's parsed in the same
way into a reiteration of meetings and partings, set in different locations
and shaped with ellipses to emphasize cycles instead of forward motion.
The hero and heroine are perhaps too well matched: a good little boy and
girl, both strengthened and hemmed in by a sense of guilt and duty. The
story's irresolvable dilemma is tailored just for them: one senses that many
of the supporting characters would be able to cope adequately with this
kind of obstacle to love. As Tsukasa and Kayama ricochet through their damaged
lives, they sing and dance occasionallly, drink a lot, play pachinko, bear
up under morally compromising jobs, and have fun sometimes, though their next
unexpected meeting always wipes the smiles off their faces. Much of the
film's force comes from the spectacle of strong people maintaining their dignity
through an unending trial. Maybe Floating Clouds is a love story in
the guise of a story about endurance, and Scattered Clouds is the
other way around. My one problem with this film is that the ending
seems to hit too hard, with too many reasons for the lovers to part: maybe
Naruse could have gotten away with just that terrible, violent train passing
the lovers' cab, with its implicit sense of catastrophe.