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| Kinuyo Tanaka in Ginza Cosmetics |
I'm not entirely sure what the title, Ginza Cosmetics, means. But I think it has something to do with putting on a good face when things are troubled inside. That applies to the protagonist, Yukiko (the great Kinuyo Tanaka), a bar hostess struggling to raise her young son, Haruo (Yoshihiro Nishikubo), and at the same time trying to keep the bar she works in from going out of business. But it also applies to the Ginza itself, the bustling shopping and entertainment district of Tokyo. At one point, Yukiko is showing a young man from the country around the city, and points out how much of the area he finds oppressively noisy and crowded had been leveled during the war: The Ginza itself has put on a new face, hiding its scars. Mikio Naruse's film is an account of several days in Yukiko's life, a character study without melodrama. She has a few moments of crisis: Haruo, who is usually a quiet and studious child who looks after himself (with the aid of a few neighbors) while Yukiko goes to work, once wanders off for a few hours, to her distress. And she is almost raped by an old acquaintance whom she goes to in search of money to help the bar's owner from having to sell it. There's also some tension among the women who work in the bar when the marriageable young man from the country comes to visit one of them. At the end, life goes on without the usual narrative resolution, and if you're like me you feel you've had a privileged glimpse into another world and another life.
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