Criterion Sunday 442: 二十四の瞳 Niju-shi no Hitomi (Twenty-Four Eyes, 1954)

It’s over two-and-a-half hours long, and it feels like a great Japanese epic of wartime defeat, humbling itself on the world stage, but yet it humanises the conflict effectively by focusing on a strongly anti-war teacher and her 12 young students, who grow up from little rascals in 1928 to fighting in the war by the end of the film. We never see any war action, but it’s all filtered through the teacher (Miss “Pebble” is her nickname for much of the film, played by Mikio Naruse’s favourite Hideko Takamine), with a strong heft of sentimentality in the musical cues — not one of those twenty-four eyes is dry at any point in the film, it sometimes seems. Still, it’s a lovely film, with wide vistas of the island they all live on, contrasted with close-ups of the children’s faces for maximum pathos. Despite it all being thickly laid on, it never feels overly manipulative: this is a story about loss and sadness, but also of people whose lives continue regardless, and about the value of life itself.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director/Writer Keisuke Kinoshita 木下惠介; Cinematographer Hiroshi Kusuda 楠田浩之; Starring Hideko Takamine 高峰秀子, Chishu Ryu 笠智衆; Length 156 minutes.

Seen at Courthouse Cinema, London, Sunday 22 April 2018.

Criterion Sunday 377: 女が階段を上る時 Onna ga Kaidan o Noboru Toki (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, 1960)

Director Mikio Naruse had a great run of cinematic masterpieces throughout the 1950s (I did a whole week focusing on his work) and in some ways it’s capped by this melancholy 1960 film, starring one of his frequent collaborators, the wonderful Hideko Takamine. In one blurb I read online, she plays an “ageing Ginza bar hostess”, but Mama-san, as she’s known (her real name is Keiko), is just turning 30; Keiko’s nickname suggests the blurb may not be inaccurate, but if so it’s very much just another commentary on the society depicted in the film. Keiko is motivated and very good at her job, but every step she takes is negotiated with a series of men — to succeed at her job she needs to appeal to them, to make money to have any hope of opening her own bar she essentially needs to sell herself to them (or at least the possibility of her being their wife), and then there are the expectations placed on her by her family. It’s a sad film, but Takamine’s performance ensures it’s never overloaded with mawkishness or hopelessness. She keeps on moving, working, trying to make ends meet throughout, in this post-war Japan dominated by wealth and its acquisition, while all the time people are calling up their debts or talking money in front of her.

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FILM REVIEW: Criterion Collection
Director Mikio Naruse 成瀬巳喜男; Writer Ryuzo Kikushima 菊島隆三; Cinematographer Masao Tamai 玉井正夫; Starring Hideko Takamine 高峰秀子, Tatsuya Nakadai 仲代達矢, Keiko Awaji 淡路恵子, Masayuki Mori 森雅之, Daisuke Kato 加東大介; Length 111 minutes.

Seen at home (DVD), Wellington, Sunday 6 December 2020.

流れる Nagareru (Flowing, 1956)

I’m finishing off my week dedicated to Mikio Naruse with this 1956 drama, though he kept making films for another decade after this. One of them (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, from 1960) is in the Criterion Collection so will eventually get reviewed here when I get to it in my regular Criterion Sunday feature.

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I love Mikio Naruse’s films but I’m also very conscious that I don’t really have the language to describe them, but this was an era when (because there were essentially no women directing films, aside from rare examples like Kinuyo Tanaka, who stars in this film, and Park Nam-ok in Korea) you’d get a whole cadre of venerated older men anointed as being excellent at ‘women’s pictures’. There are barely any men in this film, but there’s still a strong sense that the women we see — from the woman who runs the business (Isuzu Yamada), to her geisha employees, her maid, her daughter (Hideko Takamine), her sister and mentor — are all essentially still powerless in a society that esteems the money of men most highly. Even a drunken family member of a former employee seems to get his way, while the woman who owns the business is having trouble keeping it going. The story is largely told from the new maid’s point-of-view, and Kinuyo Tanaka is just wonderful at giving depth to this middle-aged woman fallen on hard times, but who still has enormous empathy and a remarkable grace in dealing with all the backstabbing and various fallings out. And yet for all this behind-the-scenes drama of the geisha house, it’s still a rather gentle and sweet film — the title suggests the gentle movement of a river, but also its inevitability and unchanging nature — about events which are not particularly gentle or sweet.

CREDITS
Director Mikio Naruse 成瀬巳喜男; Writers Toshiro Ide 井手俊郎 and Sumie Tanaka 田中澄江 (based on the novel by Aya Koda 幸田文); Cinematographer Masao Tamai 玉井正夫; Starring Hideko Takamine 高峰秀子, Isuzu Yamada 山田五十鈴, Mariko Okada 岡田茉莉子, Haruko Sugimura 杉村春子, Kinuyo Tanaka 田中絹代; Length 117 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Sunday 17 February 2019.

浮雲 Ukigumo (Floating Clouds, 1955)

Another Naruse melodrama about a single woman living her life and finding others — perhaps society itself — can’t quite live up to her standards. Exquisite as ever, and available on DVD.

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Mikio Naruse often makes melodramas, and when he does them they’re as big and bold in many ways as contemporary Hollywood ones — with almost as much exploitation (if that’s the right word, perhaps not) of the suffering of women — but yet there’s so much elegance and subtlety as it unfolds. In a way the central character here, Yukiko (played by the wonderful Hideko Takamine), is a metaphor for post-war Japan, but her travails in love — finding a man while working in Indochina, then discovering he’s married when they return to Japan after the war, and proceeding to doubt his motives throughout, as he courts other women — also pretty starkly illustrate her place as a woman in this society. I find it really difficult to write about what’s good in the film, as I lack a lot of context for writing about 1950s melodrama, a rich and complex topic, except that Naruse’s film is compelling and beautiful.

CREDITS
Director Mikio Naruse 成瀬巳喜男; Writer Yoko Mizuki 水木洋子 (based on the novel by Fumiko Hayashi 林芙美子); Cinematographer Masao Tamai 玉井正夫; Starring Hideko Takamine 高峰秀子, Masayuki Mori 森雅之, Mariko Okada 岡田茉莉子; Length 123 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Sunday 3 February 2019.

稲妻 Inazuma (Lightning, 1952)

Breaking up the films which have had proper DVD releases is this film which you can see in a fairly good print on YouTube right now if you want, and I’d recommend checking it out. I certainly think I need to watch it again to pick up on all its subtleties, but Hideko Takamine’s wonderful acting is clear enough.

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Nothing happens in Lightning, or rather I should say it’s filled with incident — bickering, sisterly squabbles, family fallouts, creepy dudes (and nice ones too) — but there’s nothing really big, there’s no disease killing one of them, there’s no life-changing event that they all rally together around, there’s no war, it’s just the flow of life. I think somehow Naruse’s films of this period, many of them (like this one) adaptations of the novelist and poet Fumiko Hayashi, stop somewhere just short of full-blown melodrama, though emotion clearly roils beneath the placid surface of his shots. Hayashi’s work, it seems, had a particular interest in individual women making a life for themselves, and her work is brilliantly conveyed by Hideko Takamine (another of Naruse’s regular collaborators in this period). Takamine, like Setsuko Hara, like many of the great actors, conveys a wealth of emotions through her eyes, though Takamine (and the character she plays here, Kiyoko) has a harder edge, perhaps developed in response to the insistence of her family that she settle down. It’s mentioned at one point that there’s one man to every 23 women in this post-war period, and certainly her half-brother has little interest in settling down, while another family friend, a sleazy baker, is on the prowl amongst all of the sisters. The resolution of the film, such as it is, just seems to be a level of understanding between mother (Kumeko Urabe) and daughter, the latter of whom has moved out of the family home by this point. These characters have a future, but we are left to imagine it.

CREDITS
Director Mikio Naruse 成瀬巳喜男; Writer Sumie Tanaka 田中澄江 (based on the novel by Fumiko Hayashi 林芙美子); Cinematographer Shigeyoshi Mine 峰重義; Starring Hideko Takamine 高峰秀子, Mitsuko Miura 三浦光子, Chieko Murata 村田知英子, Kumeko Urabe 浦辺粂子; Length 87 minutes.
Seen at home (YouTube), London, Thursday 23 April 2020.