Floating Clouds (Mikio Naruse, 1955)

Hideko Takamine in Floating Clouds

Yukiko Koda: Hideko Takamine
Kengo Tomioka: Masayuki Mori
Sei Mukai: Mariko Okada
Sugio Iba: Isao Yamagata
Kuniko Tomioka: Chieko Nakakita
Seikichi Mukai: Daisuke Kato

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yoko Mizuki
Based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Production design: Satoru Chuko
Film editing: Eiji Ooi
Music: Ichiro Saito

Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds brings to mind some of Ernest Hemingway's stories about war-damaged lovers trying to make the best of a doomed relationship. Yukiko is a young woman returning to Tokyo after working in Japanese-occupied French Indochina as a secretary. There she had an affair with the bitter, cynical Kengo, an employee of the Japanese forest service who is married to the sickly Kuniko. Trying to make it on her own in postwar Japan, Yukiko finds that her secretarial skills are in little demand because she doesn't know English, a necessity under the American occupation. Desperate, she picks up an American soldier and becomes his mistress. Meanwhile, she also seeks out Kengo, and finds him trying to make a go of it in the lumber business, still married to Kuniko but unwilling to divorce her and marry Yukiko. So over the course of the film, these two deeply wounded people meet and part repeatedly, not only lacerating themselves but also hurting others with words and deeds. At the end, they have seemingly found a way to live together, partly by retreating from the world onto a remote Japanese island, but even that rapprochement is ill-fated. Naruse's film is an absorbing downer, gaining much of its energy from our suspense about what the protagonists will do to each other next, as well as a showcase for Hideko Takamine's marvelous performance. There are those who think it a masterpiece. 

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (Mikio Naruse, 1960)

Hideko Takamine and Daisuke Kato in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs

Keiko Yashiro: Hideko Takamine 
Kenichi Komatsu: Tatsuya Nakadai 
Junko Inchihashi: Reiko Dan 
Nobuhiko Fujisaki: Masayuki Mori 
Matsukichi Sekine: Daisuke Kato 
Yuri: Keiko Awaji 
Goda: Ganjiro Nakamura 
Minobe: Eitaro Ozawa 
Tomoko: Chieko Nakakita 

Director: Mikio Naruse 
Screenplay: Ryuzo Kikushima 
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Production design: Satoru Chuko 
Film editing: Eiji Ooi 
Music : Toshiro Mayuzumi 

If I ran a revival house like the Stanford Theater in Palo Alto or the Castro in San Francisco, I'd like to program a series of double features of American and Japanese "women's pictures." It would give us a chance to compare not only directors like Douglas Sirk and Mikio Naruse but also the actresses most associated with the genre: Joan Crawford, Jane Wyman, and Lana Turner on the one hand; Kyoko Kagawa, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine on the other. Takamine is the woman who ascends the stairs in Naruse's film, only to hit something like a glass ceiling. She plays Keiko (at first a little confusingly, at least to Western audiences, called "Mama"), a Ginza bar hostess whose job it is to bring in paying customers, especially rich ones,who will while away their after-office hours flirting with her and the fleet of bar girls. She doesn't sleep with the customers -- even the younger women aren't expected to, but sometimes do -- and though she drinks with them, she doesn't particularly like alcohol. But Keiko is on the brink of turning 30, and when the bar starts losing customers to a younger hostess named Yuri, who has left Keiko's establishment to start her own, she begins to see what a dead-end she faces. She doesn't own the bar where she works, and the woman who does is beginning to blame her for losing customers and for not wearing flashier kimonos. She supports her mother and somewhat feckless brother, who has a son who needs an operation to correct a defect left by polio.She begins to hate climbing the stairs to the bar every night and the stress brings on a peptic ulcer, but she can see only three options for her life: Marry, become the mistress of a wealthy patron, or buy her own bar. Each of these opportunities presents itself during the course of the film, only to end in disappointment, and at the end she is climbing the stairs again. Takamine is marvelous, so expressive that we hardly need her voiceover narration to know what she's feeling and thinking, and she's well-supported by Reiko Dan as the younger, more carefree bar girl; Tatsuya Nakadai as the bar's handsome young business manager, who's in love with Keiko; Daisuke Kato as the chubby customer who proposes a marriage to Keiko that she accepts before learning that he's already married and a constant philanderer;and Masayuki Mori as the potential wealthy patron with whom, in a moment of drunken abandonment, she sleeps, only to learn the next morning that he's moving to Osaka.When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a beautifully made account of problems specific to a time, a place, and a gender, yet universal in its depiction of the frustrations of the working life.    

Mother (Mikio Naruse, 1952)

Kyoko Kagawa in Mother

Masako Fukuhara: Kinuyo Tanaka
Toshiko Fukuhara: Kyoko Kagawa
Shinjiro: Eiji Okada
Ryousuke Fukuhara: Masao Mishima
Susumo Fukuhara: Akihiko Katayama
Hisako Fukuhara: Keiko Enami
Uncle Kimura: Daisuke Kato
Tetsuo: Takashi Ito
Aunt Noriko: Chieko Nakakita

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yoko Mizuki
Cinematography: Hiroshi Suzuki
Music: Ichiro Saito

Mutatis mutandis, Mikio Naruse's Mother could almost have been a 1950s Hollywood family drama starring Irene Dunne or Myrna Loy in the title role: a woman struggling to help her family survive difficult times. Of course, the necessary change would be that of setting: Mother is very much a portrait of lower middle class Japan in the immediate postwar years. Masako Fukuhara is not just trying to feed her family but also struggling with the effects of the war, including disease -- the death of her only son from tuberculosis -- and crippling loss -- she and her husband, Ryosuke, take in her sister Noriko's little boy, Tetsuo, after Noriko returns from Manchuria, where her husband was killed. Masako's struggle gets worse after Ryosuke works himself to death reestablishing the family's laundry business. Fortunately, there is Uncle Kimura, who had been a prisoner of war in Russia, to help out in the laundry, but Masako still has to raise her teenage daughter, Toshiko, as well as her younger daughter, Hisako, called Chako. What links Mother to the Hollywood films is some sentimental melodrama, a characteristic not usually ascribed to Naruse's work, and some rather conventional comic relief, such as the scene in which Toshiko's boyfriend, Shinjiro, sees her dressed as a bride and thinks she's marrying someone else, when in fact she's modeling for Noriko, who is trying to make it as a hair stylist. Fortunately, Naruse knows how to work against sentimentality and convention with some distancing tricks. In mid-film we are suddenly presented with a title card that says "The End" in Japanese -- a moment that actually made me reach for the remote control to see if the screening service had somehow skipped to the end. It turns out to be the end title for a movie that Toshiko and her friends have gone to see -- a weepie that has left them in the tears guaranteed by its advertising. It also helps that Mother has the extraordinary Kinuyo Tanaka and Kyoko Kagawa playing mother and daughter -- a relationship they would repeat in Kenji Mizoguchi's Sansho the Bailiff (1954). It's also fun to see Eiji Okada as Shinjiro, one of his early performances, before he achieved international fame in Hiroshima Mon Amour (Alain Resnais, 1959) and Woman in the Dunes (Hiroshi Teshigahara, 1964).

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

The End of Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1961)

I would call Ozu the most "Chekhovian" of filmmakers because his movies really do remind me of Chekhov's plays. But the adjective has been so overused to the point that all it seems to mean is "a melancholy character study with a little humor, no action, and not much plot." That is, of course, true of The End of Summer, but it doesn't come close to capturing the effect of the film, the sense of having spent privileged moments with people as they go through the universal experiences of living: love, disappointment, death, reconciliation, coping with the past, and so on. It's about the Kohayagawa family, who run a small sake brewery that's in financial difficulties, partly because the patriarch, Manbei (Ganjiro Nakamura), has lost interest in the company. In his old age, he has rediscovered a former mistress, Sasaki (Chieko Naniwa), whose 21-year-old daughter, Yuriko (Reiko Dan), may be his own child. She's a flighty young thing who has a couple of American boyfriends and really hopes only to get a mink stole out of Manbei. Meanwhile, his own family struggles to figure out what to do with the business and how to keep track of Manbei, sometimes sending out employees to follow him on his excursions to see Sasaki. Manbei has two daughters, Fumiko (Michiyo Aratama) and Noriko (Yoko Tsukasa), as well as a daughter-in-law, Akiko (Setsuko Hara), his son's widow. Fumiko is married, and Manbei wants to get Noriko and Akiko married off before he dies, so he asks his brother-in-law, Kitagawa (Daisuke Kato), to find husbands for them. Neither woman is particularly interested in Kitagawa's picks, but they go through the motions to please Manbei. Like I said, not much plot, but Ozu and co-screenwriter Kogo Noda make the most of the characters, particularly Manbei himself, whom Nakamura turns into an endearing scamp. As often in Ozu's films, there are peripheral characters who serve as a kind of chorus: In this case, it's a couple of farmers (Chishu Ryu, who appeared in almost all of Ozu's films, and Yuko Mochizuki) who watch the funeral procession at the film's end and provide the appropriate comment about the "cycle of life."