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. 

Spring Dreams (Keisuke Kinoshita, 1960)

Chieko Higashiyama and Chishu Ryu in Spring Dreams

Chizuko Okudaira: Mariko Okada
Miss Yasugi: Yoshiko Kuga
Shobei Okudaira: Eitaro Ozawa
Shinichiro Atsumi: Chishu Ryu
Grandma: Chieko Higashiyama
Miss Yae: Michiko Araki
Tamiko Okudaira: Yatsuko Tan'ami
Mamoru Okudaira: Yusuke Kawazu
Dr. Hanamura: Shuji Sano
Eiichi Kato: Shinlji Tanaka
Ema: Miki Mori
Haruko: Mie Fuji
Kimiko: Meiko Nakamura
Umeko: Yukio Toake

Director: Keisuke Kinoshita
Screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Cinematography: Hiroshi Kusuda
Art direction: Chiyoo Umeda
Film editing: Yoshi Sugihara
Music: Chuji Kinoshita

Keisuke Kinoshita's attempt at something like screwball comedy, Spring Dreams, has been likened to Jean Renoir's Boudu Saved From Drowning (1932) because of its premise: a member of the lower classes throws a self-centered middle class household into chaos. In this case, it's a sweet potato vendor who has a stroke in the living room of the Okudaira household and is forced to recuperate there. Because most of the action takes place in a few rooms in the Okudaira house, I'm more reminded of the stage comedies of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can't Take It With You, especially since Kinoshita films with long "theatrical" takes. The head of the household, Shobei Okudaira, is an irascible would-be tyrant, bullying and mocking not only his family but also his secretary, Miss Yasugi, taunting her as an old maid. The workers of his pharmaceutical company are threatening to strike as the film begins, so he has a lot to bluster about. In true comic fashion, there are romantic problems to solve -- Shobei's daughter Chizuko wants to marry an artist, while he wants her to marry the son of one of his executives, if only to provide a suitable heir for his business. His own son, Mamoru, is a nerdy would-be philosopher who goes about inquiring into the meaning of life and has no interest in the business or much of anything else. (He's played by Yusuke Kawazu, unrecognizable as the same actor who played the rebellious Kiyoshi in Nagisa Oshima's Cruel Story of Youth, made the same year.) In the course of the film, the spinster Miss Yasugi will also find love, and even the matriarch of the household, Okudaira's mother-in-law, will recognize the sweet potato vendor as the lost love of her youth -- they're played, incidentally, by Chieko Higashiyama and Chishu Ryu, the elderly couple of Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story (1953). Chuji Kinoshita's harpsichord score lends a delicacy to a film with a good deal of charm.

Late Autumn (Yasujiro Ozu, 1960)

Yoko Tsukasa, Setsuko Hara, Ryuji Kita, Shin Saburi, and Nobuo Nakamura in Late Autumn

Akiko Miwa: Setsuko Hara
Ayako Miwa: Yoko Tsukasa
Yuriko Sasaki: Mariko Okada
Soichi Mamiya: Shin Saburi
Shuzo Taguchi: Nobuo Nakamura
Seiichiro Hirayama: Ryuji Kita
Shotaru Goto: Keiji Sada
Shukichi Miwa: Chishu Ryu

Director: Yasujiro Ozu
Screenplay: Kogo Noda, Yasujiro Ozu
Based on a novel by Ton Satomi
Cinematography: Yuharu Atsuta
Production design: Tomiji Shimizu
Film editing: Yoshiyasu Hamamura
Music: Takanobu Saito

It's possible to think of 1960 as a kind of watershed year in Japanese film, with the appearance of two such radically different films as Nagisa Oshima's The Sun's Burial and Yasujiro Ozu's Late Autumn. The contrast between the lurid chaos of Oshima's underworld and the strict geometry (of both style and morals) of Ozu's middle classes couldn't be sharper. I imagine some alien intelligence on a distant planet intercepting transmissions of both films and wondering that they could possibly come from the same world, let alone the same country (and even the same film studio, Shochiku). Ozu was of course an established master, whereas Oshima was beginning a career -- with a bang, it should be said, making three feature films that year. The razzle-dazzle of The Sun's Burial was long behind Ozu, if it was ever really in his cinematic vocabulary. But both films speak to the restless undercurrents in Japanese postwar society, Oshima's by confronting the disorder and corruption, Ozu's by slyly examining the breakup of stifling traditions in the Japanese family. Both end with solitary women, the gangster-prostitute Hanako in The Sun's Burial and the empty-nest mother Akiko in Late Autumn, confronting loneliness. But if Hanako has a counterpart in Ozu's film, it's really the feisty Yuriko, the representative of the younger generation who sorts out all the tangled threads that the meddling older generation has gotten snared in. At this point I feel the comparisons getting strained, but it's always fun to let differing films sort themselves out.

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.