Yama no oto / Sound of the Mountain (1954)

28 07 2015

Sound of the Mountain opens with an image of white collar workers leaving their urban space of labor. It would seem ominous if its placement wasn’t so forgetful. The context of the sequence is explained. We discover we’re at the office of Shingo and his son, Shuichi. Shingo is headed back to their home in Kamakura, while Shuichi has stayed behind and discreetly asked his secretary if she wants to join him for a night out. Shingo provides the perspective in Yasunari Kawabata’s source novel of the same name, but of course, in Naruse’s world, we discover the ripples of his behavior and the people it hurts. Sound of the Mountain is a film about a man, but the concern is not in his troubles, but instead in the women he, rather obliviously, harms. The pain and suffering is quiet, almost muffled, but Naruse in his unique brilliance, reveals not only this pain but the processes that allow it to occur.

1

Shingo and his son, Shuichi are joined at home by their respective wives. Kikuko, presumably still in her 20s, is dutiful to her father-in-law but reciprocates the cold indifference she faces from her husband, Shuichi. Quickly, we learn that Shuichi’s sexual concerns are elsewhere, first we see him keep up a casually flirtatious relationship with his secretary and later, we learn that he’s having an affair with a dancer named Kinu. He grows increasingly frigid to Kikuko, who greatly enjoys (and prefers) the company of her father-in-law. Meanwhile, her sister-in-law, Fusako moves in with her children as her husband has once again abused her trust.

2

Late in the film, Shingo’s own wife, Yasuko remarks, “The sadness of a woman is very different from the sadness of a man.” In context, the quote reads as a critique of Shingo’s attempts to “understand” the women around him. Shingo is the main protagonist in both Kawabata’s novel and this adaptation. Yet, he serves a very different purpose here. His thoughts are privileged in the Kawabata novel, programmed as the filter with which we experience the events of the story. Naruse’s film, which many describe as literary, cannot be described as literary benefiting their source. In a way, Naruse has compiled a critique of Kawabata’s novel, one that gracefully creates holes in Shingo’s perspective. Shingo is a noble character, sure, but it is here (not the novel) that he’s not the peacemaker he makes himself out to be. He’s displeased with his son, but their shared apathy has been to the benefit of their guarded, perhaps subconscious sexist ideas.

3

 

Shuichi hurts many women throughout the film, though our attention to initially directed towards his actions (or lack thereof) regarding Kikuko. Our sympathies are established with her at the start. Because of this, a sick feeling in our stomachs develops when we see Shuichi flirting with his secretary, Hideko. A less observant film would point our outrage to Hideko for participating in this act, we would be just as angry with her as we are with Shuichi. Naruse sets Hideko and later, Shuichi’s mistress, Kinu as obstacles to a happy marriage. This is convenient and it happens a lot in narratives such as this, but Naruse peels back from this limited  framing and gives us the lives of these women. In Lightning, Mitsuko and Kiyoko visit the home belonging to the mistress of the former’s deceased husband. Here, Naruse doesn’t shift our sympathies as much as he expands them. We can feel Mitsuko’s pain as she mourns the loss of her husband and struggles financially as we feel for her husband’s mistress who might be even worse off. This expansion of sympathy happens throughout Sound of the Mountain, as we uncover the pain Shuichi is responsible for in Kikuko, Hideko, and Kinu.

4

Notably, these three women never appear on screen together and there is evidence to suggest that they’ve felt Shuichi’s wrath on different levels. Kikuko is ignored, Hideko is yelled at, but Kinu is physically beaten. All three are violence, but only one act is visible to us on screen. That’s Shuichi’s lack of action to Kikuko. His tantrums and outbursts aren’t shown to us, which might question some to ask if Shuichi, so quietly portrayed by a stone faced Ken Uehara can really be responsible for these acts? The answer, of course, is yes and these forms of violence often are never visible in public. Acting aloof, which is how he conducts himself around Kikuko, doesn’t suggest to many violence, but sometimes not doing anything creates the situation where suffering persists.

5

As Shuichi obliviously perpetuates and excuses the violence he inflicts on the women around him, his father struggles to fix the situation. Many have written about Shingo’s quasi-incestuous relationship with Kikuko, but there’s a balance in sexual curiosity (which manifests most brilliantly in the scene with the noh mask) and mutual respect.  Shingo’s quest to save his son’s marriage has more to do with this sensation he feels for Kikuko, but a passive misogyny (one that has carried over to his son) stunts his ability. Quite early on, a lecture to his son about family is given a sufficient retort: “how many mistresses did you have, dad?”

6

 

Shingo’s presence is crucial to Sound of the Mountain but his existence, his struggles, his anguish is not Naruse’s concern. Shingo, almost like a detective, uncovers the suffering his son has inflicted on Kikuko, Hideko, and Kinu. The film is not a moral moment, and its poignant finale is not a moment where he is redeemed for his son’s behavior. Instead, Naruse, in one of his most moving sequences, allows Shingo and Kikuko, a goodbye. Kikuko makes an observation about the vista in the park, and it is the first moment in the film where she asserts herself socially. Nothing has been overcome, though, Naruse has just given us a small victory. Kikuko has left Shuichi, leaving the family (or at least the father-in-law) that she cared about so much. It’s trite to say that who knows what the future holds, but in Naruse’s case, that isn’t exactly an exciting prospect. The abusive living conditions has been escaped, but resiliency doesn’t guarantee that Kikuko only has happiness awaiting her. Still, there is something rewarding in knowing she doesn’t have to deal with Shuichi.

7


Comments : 2 Comments »
Tags: , ,
Categories : Reviews

Inazuma / Lightning (1952)

10 07 2015

I don’t mind it when someone asks me “what’s the best Naruse” because I can at least admire the fact that the person asking it, is willing to engage in a conversation about the filmmaker. It’s not a question I like answering though because people change, the power certain films have over us can dissolve and rot away as we grow older and get attached to different things. Case in point, I watched Lightning around five years ago and while I enjoyed it, I comfortably placed it outside of his pantheon. Now, though, as I bring different concerns into the viewing, I find that Lightning might be the perfect synthesis of a career that should be explored fully. I don’t like to pick one Naruse film, as I prefer to survey the nourishment his career provided. If I did have to pick one, though, it might be Lightning.

1

Kiyoko Komori works as a bus conductress in the Ginza district, but comes home to cramped corridors she shares with three half-siblings. They all share a mother, Osei, who seems too bruised by reality to step in and confront the tensions that are palpable between her children. Kiyoko is disgusted by her unemployed half-brother and irked by the manipulative and luscivious nature of Nuiko. She strikes up something of a friendship with Mitsuko, who is lined up for some insurance money following the death of her husband. While the rest of the family try to convince Mitsuko that they need this money (which never comes), Kiyoko helps Mitsuko deal with the debt that has been left behind.

2

All of Naruse’s films are about the city, even the ones (such as Summer Clouds) that take place far away from it. Lightning is a film that travels through Tokyo and by doing so, it shows us not the Far East Metropolis consisting solely of awe-inspiring skyscrapers and neon lights. Jules Dassin’s The Naked City captured all of New York City’s Five Boroughs and by doing so, it claimed to offer a multitude of voices in a city that, especially in cinema, is often framed as only meaning one thing. Dassin’s film, which I admit is not fresh in my mind, plays all five boroughs as cut from the same noir fabric. Lightning offers a similarly wide view of Tokyo, and the scope of Naruse’s view seems very pointed. After all the film opens with Kiyoko (played by Hideko Takamine) giving a tour of the Ginza, the site of glamorous and vibrant nightlife that would provide a nice hook to the opening of another film. It is a part of Tokyo, but it is not all of Tokyo.

3

Kiyoko and Mitsuko visit Koto-ku, that has few visual similarities to the Ginza of the film’s opening. It is also part of Tokyo. Naruse’s accomplishment is not just that he offers different kinds of spaces within a city, but instead his implications of the story untold and voices ignored within it. Kiyoko and Mitsuko travel to this ward to Ritsu, a single mother who claims to have been a mistress to Mitsuko’s husband before his death. Ritsu’s plight is one that we can easily sympathize with, even as she coldly attempts to squeeze money from Mitsuko’s non-existent insurance money. Her Tokyo is not the viewer’s Tokyo, it’s not even Kiyoko’s Tokyo, and “knowing the city” is quite literally her job.

4

Eventually, Kiyoko has to escape the city. In one of the many moving moments that Naruse playfully punctuates with Chopin’s, she longingly stares at a quaint portrait of the suburbs. She moves there, and is greeted by a pair of siblings that act as opposites to her and her half-siblings. Great importance is placed on Kiyoko’s unmarried status in the city, but the men around are so fervently disgusting that the idea irritates her, and provides an added incentive to move away from her family. The brother and sister in suburbs, Shuzo and Tsubomi, provide a place for her to feel something. They’re both extremely attractive and talented (they play Chopin on piano, making the non-diegetic motif of his music from earlier in the film diegetic) and have no attachment to their parents. This isn’t to say that Kiyoko has to act on this attraction and she doesn’t, but their heavenly appearance restores the faith lost in her interactions with her family.

5

Lightning concludes with Kiyoko’s reunion with her mother, Osei. At first, she lashes out, blames her mother’s lack of responsibility on the chaotic homelife that it spawned for her children. There’s an inflection in her voice that suggests that she feels bitterness towards her mother for attaching herself to multiple men. Her mother cries, rather pathetically, as the titular lightning strikes outside. Kiyoko, now in her preferred suburbs, has a beautiful view of the phenomenon and casually accepts her mother’s bargaining. Kiyoko is a cynic throughout the film, perhaps aspiring to be snobbishly bourgeois. Once again, the promise of progress and modernity made by the American occupation is present, even if it is technically invisible. Kiyoko has bought in to it, and fashioned herself as the sophisticated young woman separate from the urban poor that is her (half) family. Yet the independence she seeks in this “modernity” is incompatible, it does not encourage her retreat into the suburbs without a family, and it grinds against her ideas of marriage. The end gives us a temporary answer, a nice moment between a daughter and a mother, but it provides us no explanation to how Kiyoko can conduct herself in a world that anticipates the corrosion of her idealism.

6

Kiyoko’s manifestation of independence privileges friendship above labor and heteronormative romance. Before she becomes fast friends with Shuzo and Tsubomi, she bonds with a student who is renting a room in the family house. In one especially brilliant sequence, the student lies for Kiyoko as a potential suitor tries to gain access to the family space. The student is behind on the rent and Osei intends to throw her out, but in this scene her body guards the family space from the intruder. Naruse often frames men as literally on the sides, trying to enter the house, but denied access. The one time multiple men make into the space, a violent fight breaks out. This leads to Kiyoko leaving the city. Her suburban house is so appealing because she can control those who enter, it is an extension of her independence, which includes her refusal to submit to marriage. This struggle, as often is with Naruse, is not a triumphant one. The film ends not with the heroine overcoming and transforming her pain as something positive and heroic. Instead, the struggle continues, but at least Kiyoko has acquired some control of the situation.

7


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags: ,
Categories : Reviews

Onna no naka ni iru tanin / The Stranger Within a Woman (1966)

9 07 2015

The runaway success of Kurosawa’s High and Low in 1964 must have been enough to convince Toho that neo-noir was a viable route for their filmmakers. Two of Naruse’s last three films could be organized by the genre, even if they do manage to downplay the more thrilling elements that made Kurosawa’s film such a smash. The first of these two is A Stranger Within a Woman. Noir seems especially uncharacteristic for Naruse, but this wasn’t his first attempt at such a film, 1950 saw the release of both The Angry Street and White Beast, two films which are definitely noir-tinged. Those two films came before Naruse cultivated his mature 1950s style, the one that informed his legacy. They contain a pulpy energy, where as A Stranger Within a Woman is an airtight thriller, it seems to approach plot points with melancholy, as opposed to excitement.

1

Sugimoto runs into his long time friend, Toshiro, as the two are walking home from work. They decide to have a drink together, and then split. Arriving home, Toshiro is greeted by his wife, Masako. He tells her that he’s expecting a call from Sugimoto. The call never comes. The following day’s newspaper explains why: following a drink with Toshiro, Sugimoto returned to his home to find his wife, Sayuri, dead by way of strangulation. Soon after, Toshiro confesses to Masako that he was having an affair with Sayuri before her death. Later, he confesses that he was the one responsible for her death and that he intends to turn himself in.

2

Although Naruse provides us a great deal of information through flashback, his concern here is not for the mystery to unravel slowly. In fact, we have no reason to think that Toshiro isn’t the culprit immediately and when he confesses to infidelity thirty minutes in, most would be confident in his guilt. The flashbacks show that Naruse, although working with the mold of a thriller, was not concerned with “who did it?” or “why” either. These sequences are narrated to us with observations, ones that go attack Sayuri’s character. The first flashback, initiated by the musings of Toshiro’s mother, is a passive critique of Sayuri’s flirty nature. The flashback’s most crucial detail does not uncover itself as a clue, but rather suggests the inevitability of her death.

3

It would be a mistake to credit Sayuri as the film’s main character here, but she is the most interesting. She’s on screen for less than a minute, but the film is built on conversations around her. When Toshiro’s younger coworkers at a printing press discuss her death the first question asked is “was she good looking?” Even Sayuri’s husband, Sugimoto seems rather unmoved by her death, and he immediately rationalizes her demise as inevitable because of her “many male friends.” Here, I could suggest that Sayuri was functionally dead before she was even killed. Certainly, her death is not given any value beyond her relationship to men. Conversations frame her only as a bourgeois “slut” whose sexually transgressive nature ruined an otherwise humble man like Sugimoto. This is often how the femme fatale operates, but Naruse never gives her time to properly seduce us, suggesting that any attempt to defend Toshiro is ridiculous. Then again, Toshiro doesn’t feel like he’s been wronged like an American film noir protagonist would, he basically embraces the punishment he feels he deserves. In Naruse’s world, the hormone-driven chaos that makes noir exciting is flattened, reduced to something banal.

4

Although the film opens in Akasuka, an ideal urban setting for a noir, most of it takes place in the suburban comfort of Kamakura. Kozaburo Yoshimura’s Temptation also shows us Kamakura, but it seems that much has changed in a short eighteen years. Yoshimura’s Kamakura is represented by a beach house, one where the interiors seem to exist in a liminal space between what we conceive as indoors and outdoors. Naruse’s Kamakura should be more familiar to American audiences, we seldom go outside (it is almost always raining in the film) and so we’re left to consider a Westernized suburban home. Suburbs existed in Japan before Levittown and America’s process of suburbanization. The hybrid nature of the house represents a post-occupation structure, it is the sort of thing that Isoya Yoshida would have fought violently against in the 30s. Whether he liked it or not, gender played a huge role in Yoshida’s vision of architecture, and he spoke of “purity” both in structures and in women. The film concludes with Masako poisoning Toshiro before he can turn himself in. As she explains via voiceover, “As he tries to go out the front door with his head held high, I’ll have to sneak him out the back.” The front lawn of the American suburban house is the masculine space. The back, the garden, is feminine. Masako, just like her house, has forsaken Yoshida’s idea of “purity” in Japan. Her and the house have transitioned in American suburbia, American patriarchy, both of which maintain a similar control over her body. The revolutionary moment is not that she kills her husband and gets away with it. After all, she does so to main the respectability of the family. Instead, it comes from the realization that all the “modernity” and “progress” that American imperialism (or in this specific case, occupation) advertises to women has changed very little. Basically, the patriarchy upgraded the master’s house, but Masako must still live in it.

5


Comments : Leave a Comment »
Tags:
Categories : Reviews

Yuwaku / Temptation (1948)

4 07 2015

Infidelity is a narrative icon for melodrama. The act, or the threat of it, carries such a powerful weight that it is less a trite move but rather the groundwork for moral musings. Of course, it might help that the average film that explores this is targeted to men, who the idea of forgoing a commitment to someone younger and sexier is well, tempting. Kozaburo Yoshimura, fresh off the success of A Ball at Anjo House, found the motif worthy of exploring. Despite the best efforts of the wizardry of his camera and the excellence of his actors, Temptation ends up feeling flat. It’s a worthwhile film, sure, but when one considers the talent involved, it should have been much more.

1

Grieving at the grave of her recently deceased father,  Takako runs into Ryukichi. Ryukichi, who is now married with two children, was one of her father’s students, and the two decide to travel together back to Tokyo. They make to Gifu and decide to stop for the night, but the housing options are limited and the two are forced to share a bed. Back in Tokyo, Takako’s flatmate, Takeda is taken away by the police for making unauthorized sales. Ryukichi offers to help Takeda in court and to let Takako stay with him. Takako becomes a maid, taking care of his kids while their mother, Tokie, battles an undisclosed illness at a beach house in Kamakura. This living arrangement is ideal, but the passion between Takako and Ryukichi starts to be inexorable.

2

The two main players here are Setsuko Hara and Shin Saburi, who are, of course, excellent. Hara is despondent and hopeless, she moves with the weighty anxiety of a Antonioni character. She props herself up on telephone poles and railing, almost as though the sadness of her father’s death has made standing a chore. Once she’s invited to become Saburi’s maid, things shift. Yoshimura wants us to see her as irresistible so a smile seldom fades from her face. In one sequence, he photographs her face with the same closeness that Dreyer photographed Renee Falconetti. The sensation is different, Hara glows not to evoke our sympathy, but to understand Saburi’s temptation. It’s effective filmmaking, but it leads the film to its downfall: despite occupying the screen most of the time, Hara as Takako, is often reduced to a piece in a man’s moral crisis.

3

Tokie, the suffering and defenseless wife, is played with the compassion one should expect from Haruko Sugimura. Unfortunately, her suffering becomes a justification for Ryukichi. Early on, Ryukichi offers a light critique of traditional Japanese architecture to Takako, emphasizing the doors and partitions that protect them, like a fortress, from the outdoors. The next scene opens in Tokie’s beach house in Kamakura, which would look comfortable sitting on Malibu beach. The doors aren’t as imposing and the windows are wide open, the house itself feels outdoors. This is the more democratic alternative, and Yoshimura sees it as healthier. The sun feels immediately accessible and there are less structures to hide something. Something like an affair.

4

Takako and Ryukichi’s attraction for each other eventually boils over, if only for a fleeting second. Of course, that’s the very moment that Tokie walks in on them. Later, Takeda, freed by the court of his charges, proposes marriage to Takako. Her face is turned towards the camera and her back to his face. It resembles a better scene in Ozu’s Early Summer, featuring (fittingly) Haruko Sugimura and Setsuko Hara. Hara’s back is to the camera and the only face it captures is Sugimura’s, one of jubilation. Maybe that’s a sign of Temptation‘s weakness, it’s nice enough to remind you of other films (Repast also comes to mind) and maybe the connections aren’t incidental, but it all ends up like a parody of melodrama, something closer to a horror film.

5


Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags: , , ,
Categories : Reviews

Kyûpora no aru machi / Foundry Town (1962)

3 07 2015

The history of film is so large and intractable that we, as scholars, often have to take short cuts to fit history into a narrative that we can understand. One of these short cuts is the idea of the “house style” which was birthed out of 1930s Hollywood. It is largely specific to this moment in America, but many have transposed its idea (that film studios became linked with a certain genre or style) into other moments. Nikkatsu in 1960s Japan, for example, is synonymous with edgy, crime-driven thrillers that are indicative of the country’s cinematic shift into the rougher, more energetic and more violent Japanese New Wave. Kiriro Urayama’s Foundry Town has this kind of energy and it is concerned with generational conflict (plus, Shohei Imamura is responsible for the script), yet it seems more mature than the works that became iconic for Nikkatsu around the same time. If this all sounds a little vague, that’s because it is, and maybe we shouldn’t simplify a narrative about a studio or an era.

1

Jun is a model student at the precipice of higher education. Her devotion to studying occurs in the middle of a great drama affecting her home life. Her father, Tatsugoro, is constantly in and out of work with the myriad foundries that punctuate the landscape of Kawaguchi. To make matters worse, another child has been introduced into the family. Through her friend Yoshie, she gets a job working at a pachinko parlor. Yoshie, a Korean-American is stressed about her family’s move to North Korea, especially because her mother, who isn’t Korean, shows no intention of moving with the rest of her family.

2

Foundry Town is, much like the recently reviewed Summer Clouds, a film about labor. The film opens with the scenes of foundry life, followed by a group of workers confronting their boss about poor work conditions. Tatsugoro is the oldest in this group of workers and he’s the one most resistant to the idea of worker solidarity. When a younger worker calls out their boss for spending company funds on a mistress, Tatsugoro defends his boss and says that a man with such power would be an embarrassment if he didn’t have a mistress. Tatsugoro’s labor frames the context for the entire film. The family is in Kawaguchi precisely because this is labor he is qualified to do, and when he does lose his job(s), it is Jun who has to make sacrifices for the family.

3

While we spend most of our time with the struggles of Jun’s family, it reveals itself in the end to be about her friendship with Yoshie. Their families act as parallels, Jun needs to get away from her mother and father (and their dependence on her prohibits her from leaving) while Yoshie needs to stay together with her mother, despite her protests. Yoshie’s status as Korean-Japanese is crucial to the film, even as it is never articulated to a modern, Western audience what dynamic is revealed in her identity. We see her younger brother publicly bullied by his peers. Characters repeatedly display a confusion for which Korea Yoshie “belongs to” if they even bother to consider the relationship at all.  Of course, it is in this very moment that Foundry Town makes a (successful) turn to the melodramatic. Yoshie’s brother releases a pigeon while leaving, but it causes him to cry. He can’t leave Japan, even if it hasn’t exactly welcomed him.

4

 

The goodbyes shared between Jun and Yoshie are played in a similar melodramatic vein, but this emotional tension is brilliant in a situation that has a highly charged political context. It is seldom that the power of friendship, especially a friendship between two young girls is granted such sincerity. The economic situation of both families has forced the girls to grow up fast. Thus, its fitting that their relationship is given the attention usually afforded for adult men and no one else. The melodramatic flashes throughout the film underscore the reality of growing up, where all decisions feel crucial. Of course, they really are for Jun and Yoshie, yet the film makes an important point to sympathize with the way adults attempt to minimize their problems.

5

 

In the end, we get something of a happy ending. Tatsugoro gets another job, with the help of the union he had resisted because of socialist anxiety. Jun, meanwhile, has already started a job and intends to pay for her schooling entirely on her own. Tatsugoro is flabbergasted by this revelation and it is very likely that we are too. It seems a bit too noble that Jun would make this big of a personal sacrifice, but she’s been making sacrifices for her mother and father (who greatly undervalue her) for a long time. Their is a political importance to her life choice, she wants to provide for herself because she doesn’t want to be drawn back into an abusive home life. Poignantly, Yoshie is never given such a redemptive moment. She still has her friendship, though, and that is important.

6


Comments : 1 Comment »
Tags:
Categories : Reviews

« Previous Entries