yoko sugi – filmcentric

Mikio Naruse made three films in the year before this one, and I’m willing to bet at least one of those is equally brilliant, because he was very much on form this decade. A lot of his work was adapted from the writing of Fumiko Hayashi, but she is not the source for this one but rather the Nobel Prize-winning novelist Yasunari Kawabata, though it uses a lot of the same key cast as Naruse’s earlier film.

This is some film, one of Mikio Naruse’s finest, and I don’t want to attribute all of its success to one person, because it’s made with such sensitivity by everyone involved, but Setsuko Hara must be considered pretty central to that. Partly it’s the role she’s playing, a wife shunned by her husband (who is having an affair with a younger woman), but Hara is expert at making it not just a tragic account of this woman, but a far more rounded and nuanced portrait of familial relationships, in which Hara’s character is not to be pitied, but instead a really developed character whose motivations and actions cut against the expectations of her society and her family. I just find her every expression to be that little bit heartbreaking (not unlike in Tokyo Story, where she proved that sometimes smiling cheerfully is the saddest emotion of all). The film itself is framed by her father-in-law (So Yamamura), who is disappointed in his son (Ken Uehara) and just trying to understand Hara’s situation and consider what is best for her, which is why his reaction to news of her abortion is both so deeply felt and also so unusual in a film of this era. Surely a masterpiece of Japanese cinema, and I still have so many Naruse films yet to watch.

CREDITS
Director Mikio Naruse 成瀬巳喜男; Writer Yoko Mizuki 水木洋子 (baed on the novel by Yasunari Kawabata 川端康成); Cinematographer Masao Tamai 玉井正夫; Starring Setsuko Hara 原節子, Ken Uehara 上原謙, So Yamamura 山村聰, Yoko Sugi 杉葉子; Length 96 minutes.
Seen at home (DVD), London, Sunday 13 January 2019.

I went back to YouTube recently to look up this film by Kinuyo Tanaka, the second woman to direct feature films in Japan and herself an acclaimed actor of some renown. I was inspired by the writing of critic Cathy Brennan, who has herself written far longer and better pieces about the actor/director for Another Gaze magazine, and the Screen Queens blog. Sadly, there are few opportunities to watch Tanaka’s films currently, which is surprising given her fame as an actor and the recent interest in women’s filmmaking, but one can dream of proper releases one day I suppose.

I’ve watched a number of mid-20th century Japanese films recently, but I haven’t seen any quite like this film, one of the handful directed by acclaimed actor Kinuyo Tanaka — and perhaps it’s her perspective that makes a telling difference, or that of celebrated screenwriter Sumie Tanaka (no relation), who also wrote most of Mikio Naruse’s greatest works during the same decade. It’s just that I hadn’t seen many films that deal fairly frankly not just with a difficult relationship — in this case young housewife and budding poet Fumiko (played by Yumeji Tsukioka and based on a real figure) being pushed away by her philandering husband — but also with her subsequent breast cancer diagnosis which gives the film its memorable title. It is, ultimately, a weepie of sorts, with a grand melodramatic arc that deals with this woman turning her back on love, before admitting into her life a big city journalist (well, she lives in Hokkaido and the journalist is from Tokyo), as she tries to recover from her mastectomy in a Japanese hospital while still writing poetry. There are big emotions, but also some delicate observation too, and it’s a film that shows plenty of care in its creation, only a few years after Kurosawa made the rather better known cancer drama Ikiru.

CREDITS
Director Kinuyo Tanaka 田中絹代; Writer Sumie Tanaka 田中澄江 (based on the article by Akira Wakatsuki 若月彰, and the poetry collections 乳房喪失 and 花の原型 by Fumiko Nakajo 城ふみ子); Cinematographer Kumenobu Fujioka 藤岡粂信; Starring Yumeji Tsukioka 月丘夢路, Ryoji Hayama 葉山良二, Masayuki Mori 森雅之, Yoko Sugi 杉葉子; Length 109 minutes.
Seen at home (YouTube), London, Sunday 19 April 2020.