You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1955)

Masao: Chishu Ryu
Tamiko: Noriko Arita
Young Masao: Shinji Tanaka
Masao's Mother: Haruko Sugimura
Tamiko's Mother: Kazuo Motohashi
Tamiko's Father: Nobuo Tagaki
Tamiko's Sister: Keiko Yukishiro

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Based on a novel by Sachio Ito
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Kisaku Ito
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita loved trying things out, and was so prolific and popular a filmmaker that his studio, Shochiku, let him get away with his innovations. For You Were Like a Wild Chrysanthemum* Kinoshita and cinematographer Hiroshi Kusuda decided to put all of the film's flashback scenes inside an oval mask, giving them the effect of vignetted images in a photo album. It's an interesting choice, but to my mind a mistake: More than half of the film consists of flashbacks, and given that almost all of the drama is contained in them, there's a loss of clarity and intimacy in the film's most important scenes. The unmasked frame story consists of the return of Masao, now a man in his 70s, to the village where he grew up. His closest friend, we learn, was his cousin Tamiko, a girl two years his senior. And this age difference -- not the blood relationship -- was considered a barrier to their engagement and marriage. As the aging Masao recalls the past, we see how Tamiko's family stymied their budding romance, sending him off to school and pressuring her into an arranged marriage. It's an affecting story, well performed by not only veterans Chishu Ryu as the old Masao and Haruko Sugimura as his mother in the flashbacks, but also the younger actors who play the young Masao and Tamiko. The cinematography is lovely, and it won awards, but I still think the masking gimmick is a distraction.

*The title the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck gives it. IMDb and other sources call it She Was Like a Wild Chrysanthemum.

Repast (Mikio Naruse, 1951)

Setsuko Hara and Ken Uehara in Repast

Michiyo Okamoto: Setsuko Hara
Hatsunosuke Okamoto: Ken Uehara
Satoko Okamoto: Yukiko Shimazaki
Mitsuko Murata: Yoko Sugi
Seiko Tomiyasu: Akiko Kazami
Matsu Murata: Haruko Sugimura
Koyoshi Dohya: Ranko Hanai
Kazuo Takenaka: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi
Shinzo Murata: Keiju Kobayashi

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Toshiro Ide, Sumie Tanaka, Yasunari Kawabata
Based on a novel by Fumiko Hayashi
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Art direction: Satoru Chuko
Music: Fumio Hayasaka

Repast is one of those beautifully layered films by Mikio Naruse that defy simplistic judgments about the characters. Superficially, it's a story about a failing marriage that tempts you to take sides: Michiyo and Hatsunosuke have been married long enough that the tenderness has rubbed off of the relationship, and they have no children to provide a distraction from the routine of living together. She suffers the tedium and toil of keeping house, and he comes home from his salaryman's job in an office tired and frustrated. They are scraping by financially, and live in a less than desirable neighborhood. Initially the focus seems to be on the woman's lot -- she's the one we see doing all the lonely work of managing the house, whereas he at least has the opportunity to get out and fraternize with his fellow office workers. And when his lively young niece, Satoko, comes to visit -- actually to escape from family pressure to settle down and get married -- Michiyo finds herself slaving for both her husband and his niece. Eventually, things come to a head and Michiyo goes to Tokyo, taking Satoko back to her parents and leaving Hatsunosuke to fend for himself, which he doesn't do a particularly good job of. But Naruse is careful to let us see his side of things as well, and when Michiyo returns to him -- after making a few steps toward finding a job and leaving him permanently -- it's possible to see this as not a defeat for her so much as an acknowledgement that some remnants of their original affection remain and that she has decided to try to build a more equitable relationship on them. The performances of Setsuko Hara and Ken Uehara, who starred in several other films for Naruse, have that lived-in quality necessary for such a muted and ambivalent conclusion.

With Beauty and Sorrow (Masahiro Shinoda, 1965)

Mariko Kaga in With Beauty and Sorrow

Otoko Ueno: Kaoru Yachigusa
Keiko Sakami: Mariko Kaga
Toshio Oki: So Yamamura
Taichiro Oki: Kei Yamamoto
Fumiko Oki: Misako Watanabe
Otoko's Mother: Haruko Sugimura

Director: Masahiro Shinoda
Screenplay: Nobuo Yamada
Based on a novel by Yasunari Kawabata
Cinematography: Masao Kosugi
Art direction: Junichi Osumi
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Toru Takemitsu

Some mannered acting and stagy blocking mars Masahiro Shinoda's otherwise involving With Beauty and Sorrow, a revenge drama that doesn't quite transcend its genre. Toshio Oki, a womanizing novelist whose wife just barely puts up with his extramarital exploits, once had an affair with the young artist Otoko Ueno. She became pregnant but lost the baby at birth, and suffered severe psychological trauma. Now she lives with a young woman, Keiko, her student and her lover. Otoko has recovered her emotional stability, and even agrees to meet Oki when he telephones her on a visit to Kyoto, sending Keiko to his hotel to take him to the restaurant where they will reunite. But Keiko is, as even Otoko suggests, a little "crazy," and after the meeting begins to plot ways to bring about her lover's revenge on Oki. Eventually, this involves Keiko's seducing not only Oki but also his son, Taichiro, a graduate student of medieval Japanese history, with predictably disastrous consequences. Old pro So Yamamura is excellent as Oki, and it's good to see the great Haruko Sugimura, veteran of many films by Shinoda's mentor, Yasujiro Ozu, in the small part of Otoko's mother. But the younger actors, particularly Mariko Kaga as Keiko and Kei Yamamoto as Taichiro, turn what might have been an affecting portrayal of doomed characters into melodrama. The film benefits from Toru Takemitsu's score, though it sometimes feels a bit at odds with the soap-operatic events on screen.

Tokyo Twilight (Yasujiro Ozu, 1957)

Isuzu Yamada in Tokyo Twilight

Takako Numata: Setsuko Hara
Akiko Sugiyama: Ineko Arima
Shukichi Sugiyama: Chishu Ryu
Kikuko Soma: Isuzu Yamada
Shigeko Takeuchi: Haruko Sugimura
Sakae Soma: Nobuo Nakamura
Gihei Shimomura: Kamatari Fujiwara
Yasuo Namata: Kinzo Shin
Kenji Kimura: Masami Taura

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Music: Takanobu Saito

In commenting on Mikio Naruse's Sound of the Mountain (1954), I noted that some critics saw his film as a kind of reaction against films by Yasujiro Ozu like Late Spring (1949) in which the plot climaxes with the marriage of a young woman. Naruse was exploring the fact that marriage is not always, or even seldom, the fulfillment of things that the bride and her family have wished for. But I also noted that Ozu himself is not above his own skepticism about marriage, and no film of his depicts that skepticism more keenly and tragically than Tokyo Twilight, in which a father whose own marriage has failed is trying to cope with the failed marriage of one daughter and the troubled love life of another. The father in this case is played, as it so often was in Ozu's films, by Chishu Ryu, Ozu's favorite actor. I can see why Ozu liked him so much: Is there any other actor who can say "Hmm" with such eloquence and variety of intonation than Ryu? He has many opportunities to pack that internalized sound with meaning in Tokyo Twilight, expressing everything from doubt to contentment to disapproval, or just reinforcing his character's stoic resignation to the misfortunes that life continues to bring him. Shukichi Sugiyama and his three children were abandoned by his wife during the war, when he was stationed in Seoul, and he has done what he can to raise the family. The son from the marriage has died in an accident several years earlier, and now his daughter, Takako, has left her husband, bringing their toddler daughter to live with Shukichi. The other daughter, Akiko, has a disastrous fling with the irresponsible Kenji, who leaves her pregnant and looking for the money to have an abortion. The various secrets that the family, packed into one of the boxlike homes Ozu has made into such eloquent settings (expressing both closeness and confinement), only become more pressing when the girls' mother, Kikuko, returns to their lives: She and her new husband (the man she left Shukichi for has died) run a mah jongg parlor that Akiko, searching for Kenji, finds herself in. Kikuko overhears the young woman's name and, realizing she's her daughter, strikes up a conversation, asking about the family without revealing the truth. But then Shukichi's sister accidentally encounters Kikuko while shopping and brings him the news that she's returned. When Takako overhears, she goes to Kikuko and asks her not to reveal her identity to Akiko. But secrets will out, and Akiko, racked with guilt not only for the abortion but also for having been arrested under suspicion of prostitution while waiting for Kenji in a bar, decides that she has inherited a bad streak from Kikuko, even questioning whether Shukichi is her actual father. Events are set in motion that culminate in Takako denouncing Kikuko, who decides to leave town. There is a poignant scene at the end in which Kikuko, hoping that she has made amends with Takako, looks out of the window of the train for her daughter to say goodbye. If you know Isuzu Yamada only as the sinister "Lady Macbeth" of Akira Kurosawa's Throne of Blood (1957), her performance as the woman who has spent a lifetime of quiet regret will be eye-opening. As usual, Ozu transcends the potential for sentimental excess and arrives at just the right blend of pathos and quiet endurance.

Late Chrysanthemums (Mikio Naruse, 1954)

Haruko Sugimura in Late Chrysanthemums

Kin: Haruko Sugimura
Tomi: Yuko Mochizuki
Tamae: Chikako Hosokawa
Nobu: Sadako Sawamura
Kiyoshi: Hiroshi Koizuma
Sachkiko: Ineko Arima
Tabe: Ken Uehara
Seki: Bontaro Miake

Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Sumie Tanaka, Toshiro Ide
Based on stories by Fumiko Hayashi
Cinematography: Masao Tamai
Music: Ichiro Saito

In 1993, writer-director Nora Ephron satirized a prevailing male attitude toward "women's pictures" in Sleepless in Seattle. When the character played by Rita Wilson tears up while recounting the plot of An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey 1957), Tom Hanks's character dismisses the film as "a chick's movie," and he and Victor Garber's character mock her by bursting into tears while recalling the thoroughly macho ending of The Dirty Dozen (Robert Aldrich, 1957). Although Ephron's film had the downside of reinvigorating the old put-down phrase "chick flick," it also sent video sales and rentals of An Affair to Remember through the roof. The male-female audience split, and the willingness of filmmakers to cash in on it, dates from the days when there were movie theaters within walking distance of almost every neighborhood, and women who worked at home could take a break to watch a movie while the kids were in school. So the "matinee weepie" became a standard product of Hollywood studios, usually focusing on the problems women had with their families and their husbands -- or their lack of families and husbands. In Japan, however, women's problems were compounded by history and rapid social change: The institutions women had learned to adapt to before and during the war were being revolutionized. The constitution drafted during the occupation of Japan in 1946 went perhaps even further to establish the political and social equality of women with men than was common in the United States. The Japanese version of a "woman's picture," Mikio Naruse's Late Chrysanthemums, demonstrates both how liberating and how traumatizing this newfound equality could be for older women by focusing on four former geisha, now in late middle age, past the time when the one skill they had been trained in, pleasing men, could support them. One of the women, Nobu, has found stability by running a small restaurant. Another, Kin, had socked away the money she had earned and, never married, now lends money and invests in real estate. But Tomi and Tamae, each of whom now has a grown child but no husband, have had harder times. They share a house, but Tomi is addicted to gambling and Tamae is in poor health, which keeps her from earning what she could as a housekeeper in a hotel. Tomi is also upset that her daughter, Sachiko, who dresses in modern Western clothes, is marrying an older man, while Tamae frets first about the fact that her son, Kiyoshi, has a mistress and later that he has decided to move to Hokkaido. There's no real plot to Late Chrysanthemums, but instead a concentrated focus on characters and their reactions to a changing world. Kin, for example, is drawn back into the wartime past by the return of two men: Seki, with whom she was once so in love that they attempted a double suicide, and Tabe, an ex-soldier who was her patron. She spurns Seki, now a derelict ex-con, but eagerly receives the handsome Tabe, only to be disillusioned when it turns out that he only wants to borrow money and gets sloppily drunk. Haruko Sugimura, who was usually cast in rather vinegary roles, like a Japanese Agnes Moorehead, gives a performance of depth and understanding as Kin, but all of the film's performances are richly accomplished.

Watched on Filmstruck Criterion Channel

An Autumn Afternoon (Yasujiro Ozu, 1963)

Chishu Ryu in An Autumn Afternoon

Shuhei Hirayama: Chishu Ryu
Michiko Hirayama: Shima Iwashita
Koichi: Keiji Sada
Akiko: Mariko Okada
Yutaka Miura: Teruo Yushida
Fusako Tagachi: Noriko Maki
Kazuo: Shin'ichiro Mikami
Shuzo Kawai: Nobuo Nakamura
Nobuko Kawai: Kuniko Miyake
Sakuma ("The Gourd"): Eijiro Tono
Tomoko Sakuma: Haruko Sugimura
Bar Owner: Kyoko Kishida
Yoshitaro Sakamoto: Daisuke Kato

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Production design: Minoru Kanekatsu

If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, then what is a wise consistency? Because Yasujiro Ozu was nothing if not consistent, especially in the films of his greatest period: From Late Spring (1949) through An Autumn Afternoon, his final film, we get the same milieu -- middle class Japanese family life -- with the same problems -- aging parents, marriageable daughters, unruly children -- and the same style -- low-angle shots, stationary camera, boxlike interiors, exterior shots of buildings and landscape used to punctuate the narrative. Ozu's style would be called "mannered" except that the word suggests an obtrusive inflection of style for style's sake, whereas Ozu's style is unobtrusive, dedicated to the service of storytelling. There are, I suppose, some who are turned off by such consistency, who don't "get" Ozu. All I can say is that it's their loss, because it's a wise consistency, dedicated to trying to understand the way people work, why, for example, they conceal and obfuscate and manipulate to get what they really want. And why, sometimes, they don't even know what they really want. An Autumn Afternoon could almost be mistaken for a remake of Late Spring because of its central problem: a young woman at risk of sacrificing herself for an aging, widowed father. It stars the same actor, Chishu Ryu, as the father, Shuhei, and it ends in a strikingly similar way: The daughter, Michiko, gets married, but we never see the bridegroom, just as we never see the man Noriko marries in Late Spring. But where Late Spring centered itself on a kind of moral dilemma, the white lie the father tells to resolve the problem, An Autumn Afternoon illuminates the relationship of father and daughter through the experiences of secondary characters. If Michiko marries, will her marriage be like that of her brother and sister-in-law, strained by constant arguments about money? If Shuhei doesn't encourage her to marry, will she end up like the daughter of his old teacher, embittered because she gave up the prospect of marriage to serve him? There's yet another possibility for Shuhei: His close friend, a widower, remarried, but now his much younger wife has him on a tight leash, putting limits on him that Shuhei doesn't have, such as the ability to stop off in bars and to drink with his old war buddies. (Even Michiko tries to rein in her father where this is concerned, pointedly commenting when Shuhei comes home a little late and tipsy.) The screenplay by Ozu and his usual collaborator, Kogo Noda, deftly integrates all of these stories and more, but the shining center of the film is the performance of Ryu, constantly letting us see the conflict that is churning beneath Shuhei's calm demeanor. And it's entirely fitting that the final shot of Ozu's last film -- Shuhei, saying softly to himself, "Alone, eh?" -- features Ryu, the actor who appeared in so many of his films that he seemed to be Ozu's alter ego.

Late Spring (Yasujiro Ozu, 1949)

Hohi Aoki and Setsuko Hara in Late Spring

Shukichi Somiya: Chishu Ryu 
Noriko Somiya: Setsuko Hara 
Aya Kitagawa: Yumeji Tsukioka 
Masa Taguchi: Haruko Sugimura 
Katsuyoshi: Hohi Aoki 
Shoichi Hattori: Jun Usami 
Aiko Miwa:  Kuniko Miyake
Jo Onodera: Masao Mishima 
Kiku Onodera: Yoshiko Tsubouchi 
Misako: Yoko Katsuragi 
Shige: Toyo Takahashi
Seizo Hayashi: Jun Tanizaki

Director: Yasujiro Ozu 
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Based on a novel by Kazuo Hirotsu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta 
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada 
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura 
Music: Senji Ito 

The opening of Yasujiro Ozu's Late Spring is deceptively calm: the usual establishing shots of landscape and buildings and trains, the kind of images with which Ozu typically punctuates his narratives, and a group of women gathering for a tea ceremony. One of the women is Noriko, whose brilliant smile is also deceptive. This is the first film in Ozu's so-called "Noriko trilogy," to be followed by Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), in each of which Setsuko Hara plays a woman named Noriko. The three Norikos have nothing in common except that they are all unmarried. (In Tokyo Story she is a widow.)  The Noriko of Late Spring lives with her father, Shukichi, who is played by Ozu regular Chishu Ryu. (In Early Summer, Ryu plays Hara's brother, and in Tokyo Story her father-in-law.) The deceptions of what might be called the "get-acquainted" section of Ozu's film, which establishes for us the relationships among the characters, lie in the apparent happiness and contentment of father and daughter and the untroubled world in which they live. But Late Spring was filmed only four years after the end of the war that devastated Japan, which was still under occupation by American forces. The wounds and pain of the country and its people are invisible in the film, partly because of occupation censorship, but they provide a kind of tension in the viewer who knows what the characters must have suffered. There is only a brief mention of this in Late Spring: Noriko has been to the doctor and reports that her health has improved. Another character's reference to "forced work during the war" sheds some light on what may have caused her illness. Later, Noriko and her father visit Kyoto, and he remarks how much nicer it is than "dusty" Tokyo, obliquely referencing wartime destruction. The central deception, however, lies in Noriko's apparent contentment with her unmarried state: She feels it is her duty to spend her life caring for her widowed father, and brushes off any suggestions that at 27 she should really be thinking about getting married -- or worse, that her father might choose to remarry. She calls the second marriage of one of her father's friends "filthy." We who have seen this situation before, however, realize that the deception Noriko is perpetrating is on herself. Perhaps because she has lived through so much change and upheaval, Noriko is trying to persuade herself that her current happiness serving her father can be made permanent. And so she suffers a shock when her father displays interest in a beautiful widow, and another when he suggests that she might meet the young man her Aunt Masa thinks would be a suitable husband for Noriko. What Ozu and his frequent collaborator Kogo Noda establish here, working from a novel called Father and Daughter by Kazuo Hirotsu, is worthy of Henry James or Jane Austen -- I think particularly of Austen's Emma Woodhouse and her self-deluding attachment to her father. Eventually, Noriko is persuaded into marriage -- in a masterstroke of direction we never even see the groom -- by her father's lie: He claims that he has been planning to remarry, thereby eliminating any objection Noriko could have to seeking her own path to fulfillment. The film ends with a melancholy image of Shukichi alone, peeling an apple -- a kind of Jamesian twist on an Austenian situation. This magisterial example of Ozu's late style -- low camera angles, absence of pans and dissolves, emphasis on the somewhat claustrophobic interiors of the Japanese home -- is reinforced by Tatsuo Hamada's art direction and Yuharu Atsuta's cinematography, but most of all by the superb performances of Hara and Ryu.

Early Summer (Yasujiro Ozu, 1951)

Isao Shirasawa, Chishu Ryu, Chieko Higashiyama, Setsuko Hara, Ichiro Sugai, Kuniko Miyake, and Zen Murase in Early Summer

Noriko Mamiya: Setsuko Hara
Koichi Mamiya: Chishu Ryu
Aya Tamura: Chikage Awashima
Fumiko Mamiya: Kuniko Miyake
Shukichi Mamiya: Ichiro Sugai
Shige Mamiya: Chieko Higashiyama
Tami Yabe: Haruko Sugimura
Takako: Kuniko Igawa
Kenkichi Yabe: Hiroshi Nihon'yanagi
Sotaro Satake: Shuji Sano
Nobo Tamura: Toyo Takahashi
Nishiwaki: Seiji Miyaguchi

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Art direction: Tatsuo Hamada
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Senji Ito

Early Summer is the second of the "seasonal" films made by Yasujiro Ozu in what is now recognized as his peak postwar period. The first was Late Spring (1949), and they were followed by Early Spring (1956), Late Autumn (1960), The End of Summer (1961), and An Autumn Afternoon (1962). I mention this chiefly because the English-language titles confuse even Ozu's hard-core admirers, among whom I count myself. "Was that Early Summer or The End of Summer?" we find ourselves asking when we're talking about Ozu's films. The confusion is further compounded by the fact that four of them starred the marvelous Setsuko Hara. It also doesn't help that the name of her character in Early Summer is Noriko, which was the name of her characters in Late Spring and Tokyo Story (Ozu, 1953). So we have to remind ourselves that in Early Summer she is Noriko Mamiya, the unmarried 28-year-old daughter of Shukichi and Shige Mamiya. She lives with them as well as with her brother, Koichi, and sister-in-law, Fumiko, and their two bratty sons. She also has a well-paying clerical job and a group of old girlfriends from her schooldays. So why does everyone, even her boss, want her to get married? When her boss starts arranging things with an old business friend of his, her family encourages the connection, even though she's never met the man and he's in his early 40s. Noriko has a mind of her own, however, and eventually surprises everyone -- perhaps even herself -- with her decision. It's a comedy-drama in which nothing exciting happens -- even key events like the search for the bratty boys when they decide to run away from home take place mostly off-screen -- but Ozu holds everything in such delicate suspension, allowing us to meditate on the relationships at length, that we get caught up in the everyday lives of the film's huge cast. There are some wonderful scenes between Noriko and her girlfriends, who share the kind of in-jokes that old friends everywhere have. Some of these are lost in translation, but even that reminds us of real life, when we're left out of a group's established routines. And sometimes the subtitles wittily help us out, finding equivalents for the hick accents Noriko and her friend adopt when talking about the possibility of moving from Tokyo to the country. Ozu and co-screenwriter Kogo Noda bring the characters to life in their private moments, as when Shukichi and Shige talk wistfully about the son who remained MIA after the war, or when they see a balloon floating ahead and reflect on how sad the child who lost it must be. No filmmaker had a profounder sense of the inner lives of people in their ordinary routine.

Floating Weeds (Yasujiro Ozu, 1959)

Machiko Kyo and Ganjiro Nakamura in Floating Weeds

A remake of Ozu's 1934 silent, A Story of Floating Weeds, which adds not only the technological advances of sound and color, but also shows the maturing of Ozu's sensibility. It's clear that the director feels a deep identification with Komajuro (Ganjiro Nakamura), the "master" of the group of traveling players, who finds himself worried not only about his responsibility to the actors but also about his responsibility to his unacknowledged son, Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi), now that the young man is of an age to make the kind of mistakes Komajuro has made. The wonderful Machiko Kyo also brings great depth to the role of Sumiko, an actress in the troupe and Komajuro's current mistress. When she susses out the fact that Komajuro has a former mistress, Oyoshi (Haruko Sugimura), in the town where they're currently performing, and that Kiyoshi is his son by Oyoshi, she takes revenge by having the pretty young actress Kayo (Ayako Wakao) seduce the young man. It's a fairly conventional plot, to be sure, devised for the earlier film by Ozu and Tadao Ikeda, but it reverberates beautifully with the film's theme: a celebration of acting and all that it involves. Komajuro, after all, has been playing the role of Kiyoshi's "uncle," with Oyoshi's aid. And Kayo's acting as the seductress turns into a real love affair. Above all, though, it's the quiet mastery of film that shines through every frame of Ozu's work, made magical by Kazuo Miyagawa's cinematography and Hideo Matsuyama's production design. One of the great works by one of film's great humanists.

Morning for the Osone Family (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1946)

Haruko Sugimura, Mitsuko Miura, and Eitaro Ozawa in Morning for the Osone Family

Fusako Osone: Haruko Sugimura
Ichiro Osone: Toshinosuke Nagao
Taiji Osone: Shin Tokudaiji
Yuko Osone: Mitsuko Miura
Takashi Osone: Shiro Osaka
Issei Osone: Eitaro Ozawa
Sachiko Osone: Natsuko Kahara
Akira Minari: Junji Masuda
Heibei Tanji: Kinji Fujiwa
Ippei Yamaki: Eijiro Tono

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Eijiro Hisaita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Mikio Mori
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Takaaki Asai

One of the myths of war is that the enemy moves in lockstep, from the commander-in-chief down to the lowliest citizen. So those of us who are (just barely) old enough to remember something about living through World War II, the myth of Japan as a monolithic force lingers, even though 70 years of peace with the Japanese and a wholesale assimilation by the West of their culture, from sushi to anime, has effaced old hostilities. Morning for the Osone Family gives us a valuable sense of the way things were -- or at least may have been. Made in the year after the surrender of Japan, after ideological censorship had ceased (though the American occupation imposed its own censorship, which is why you'll find no mention of the atomic bomb in Japanese movies made just after the war), Morning for the Osone Family gives us a portrait of what a dissenting family went through during the war. How accurate the portrait may be is up to question -- just as we could question the accuracy of the "home front" movies made in the United States during and after the war. But Kinoshita and screenwriter Eijiro Hisaita give us a plausible account of what might have happened to a widow, Fusako, and her three sons, her daughter, and her brother-in-law in the waning years of the war. One son is imprisoned for writing against the war; the daughter is forced to break off her engagement to a young man because of the political implications of what her brother did; another son, a pacifist who wants to be an artist, is drafted and dies of pneumonia in a hospital; the youngest son, embracing the militarist propaganda, enlists and is killed. And then there is the domineering presence of the brother-in-law, a colonel who despises the way Fusako has raised her children to doubt the glory of the Japanese military. When his house is destroyed by bombing, he moves in with the Osone family and takes over the household. Devastated by the surrender, he begins to stockpile food in their house, even as starvation spreads across the land. The film takes place on a single set, which only emphasizes the sense of a world closing in on the family.