Naruse Week 2

This is a full slate, indeed. 9 more films, in 4 days - of a possible 10. The 10th, Yearning, played Columbus day at 9:15pm, and I found myself staring to lose it about 8:30 pm.... Alas! even I need sleep! I had another chance to see it last week, at the MFA - but skipped it in a pique when they asked me to check my backpack before going into the film. Figuring, of course, that I'd get to see it later... oh well. 17 films is a lot to absorb in 2 weeks as it is...

(As I warned last week - this is kind of a notebook dump, and I will probably give away some plot details. Naruse's films don't exactly depend on their plot twists - but if I spoil some effect by talking about it here, I'm sorry...)

Late Chrysanthemums - This is another of the three Naruse films I had been able to see before this series: it's been on video. It's about 4 ex-geisha trying to make it in 50s Tokyo. One is a money-lender, one operates a business, the other two are poor, and work as maids - one is sickly and dreamy, the other is carefree and careless. The latter two have children, though they are rather disappointing, marrying on their own, moving to Hokkaido... This is a pattern Naruse returned to many times - telling the story of a group of people - a family, the workers at a geisha house, or former colleagues - who represent a certain range of attitudes toward the world. There's usually a stingy money-grubber, usually a partier, usually one or two practical types, someone romantic and dreamy, someone resigned and ineffectual, trying, maybe, to preserve tradition... These roles are usually distributed among a group of women - if men are around, they're usually layabouts or drunkards or fool or cheats. At best, a married lover of one of the women, waiting to go back to his wife... In this film, the men manage to do all of those things - drink, loaf, beg for money, and go back to their wives...

It's a great film - one of the best, I think, though I might think that because, having seen it before, I was able to pay more attention to the details of how Naruse put it together. He does interesting things with transitions - he as a way of including shots that are completely logical syntactically, but don't fit semantically. For example - if someone leaves a house, he will cut to a shot of a person walking along the street. It's a normal, logical, transition - except the person shown on the street will not be the person who left the house, or the person who is shown entering a house when the next scene starts. That's a rather banal example - but it's a pattern he often exploits. There's a scene toward the end - Okin (the money-lender) is talking to her long ago lover Tabe - he's after money, but he's also angling for a night with her: they talk about staying the night, she's less enthused (since he's after her money), he's trying... Then Naruse cuts from the conversation to a shot of 2 people in bed: but we soon realize, it's not Okin and Tabe, it's Otomi and Tamae (the maids - who have been drinking and complaining about their children (and Okin, of course)). They're drunk, and talking about Tamae's daughter's honeymoon. Then it's back to Okin and Tabe... In this film, the effect is to bind the 4 women together - they are different, and their differences work out the possibilities available to them - and the various ways that they can suffer. It also indicates the bonds between people - this is probably more obvious in the family films (Lightning or Summer Clouds, for example), where the cross cutting (and the thematic blending, like that linkage of sexual suggestiveness, between Okin and Tabe, then the other two women talking about Tamae's daughter's wedding night) tends to emphasize their interconnections, their inability to escape from one another.

Repast - Setsuko Hara stars as the unhappy wife of a Tokyo man working in Osaka. His niece turns up - she's run away from home, and in Osaka, she hangs around the house, flirts with the husband and a neighbor kid, spends money, smokes cigarettes and loafs while Hara works works works... Hara finally can't take it anymore and heads home to mother. Of course her husband's niece goes as well, and son starts flirting with the man Hara is considering flirting with... It is, typically, a handsome, quiet film. It is interesting how Naruse makes the story seem to turn on food - the couple talks about what they are eating, about the cost of food, about how it tastes; the first fight (involving the niece) is precipitated by the girl not cooking anything for the husband. People buy food for each other, talk over meals, break up or get back together again over food, and so on. Naruse does something like this in a lot of his films - weaving threads, some significant object, through the story: money plays this role in Late Chrysanthemums... (money as objects - coins and bills and such... money in general is an inescapable presence in all of his films.)

Summer Clouds - a sprawling drama about a farming family, centering on a war widow running a farm. She survives, while her brothers sink into money difficulties and capitalism. We can see Japanese society changing in front of our eyes. Another gorgeous film, this one shot in scope and color. Another ensemble drama - a dozen or so significant characters, with the film taking time with most of them. Building sympathy for most of them, even when they have directly contradictory ideas - even after they do horrible, destructive (and usually self-destructive) things to one another. Naruse seems to subscribe to something like Renoir's statement - "the terrible thing is, everyone has good reasons" - even if he does take sides. Here, the brother tries to do things the way the did when he was young - hurting everyone around him, and failing to hold anyone in place... Naruse manages to make him sympathetic, understandable, even if he doesn't pull punches on what a disaster the old guy is for his family when he gets his way...

Floating Clouds - Hideko Takamine stars as the mistress of a married man played by Masayuki Mori, who made wartime promises back in Indo-china that he is not inclined to honor in postwar Japan. He does, however, apparently expect the occasional adulterous interlude. Takamine makes gestures toward dropping him, but he keeps coming back, and she sticks to him when he does. Naruse's films tend to be full of misery and sorrow, but usually driven by lack of money, selfish and foolish friends and neighbors, and the fate of being a woman in Japan - this one moves beyond those quieter forms of unhappiness into melodrama and degradation. Prostitution, other women, rape, murder appear alongside the Naruse standards of poverty and humiliation - it is also rather unusual (at least in the films of his I've seen) for ending in death. For good bad or indifferent, Naruse's heroines usually have to keep going at the end - their stories don't really end - some episode ends, the film can end, but they have to get up in the morning and go back to whatever it is they do.... His films usually end with the woman ascending the stairs... This is an exception.

Lightning - Takamine again, this time as the youngest of her mother's 4 children (with 4 men) - the other three are a mopey romantic whose philandering husband dies; a scheming bitch; and a layabout son who spends his time drinking and playing pachinko - add the 2nd sister's inept husband and a lecherous baker (who pursues Takamine, while bedding her sisters) - it makes a living hell of the home situation. On the other hand, it's less oppressive than most of these films - for one thing, Takamine, from the beginning, can take care of herself (she's a bus guide), and never seems in any danger of getting dragged down into the misery of the rest of her family. When things get too much, she lights out for the territories, taking a room in the suburbs... For another thing, the film itself has a much more comic tone than film like Flowing or Summer Clouds. It's corrosive comedy - at times, it is very close to the sharpness of Ichikawa's 50s satires (Mr. Pu or A Billionaire), or Imamura's. Naruse, I should note, is perfectly capable of comedy - the early films I've seen have all contained a great deal of comic business, and even late, many of these films - especially the ensemble pieces - contain a lot of wit, and even some slapstick. In Lightning, though, it is much closer to the dominant mode.

The Whole Family Works - 1939 film about a working family - 7 kids, 3 of them already working, the 4th at the point of deciding whether to continue studying or become an apprentice. Then the oldest son decides he has to go back to school, to study electrical engineering, if he wants to get out of the cycle of poverty his family is in. Remarkable for a number of reasons (besides the typically superb filmmaking) - on is how it gives weight to both sides of the debate. The boy is right, of course - if he continues to work, he will end up with his own household in exactly the same place his father is - working endlessly just to keep food on the table. He's earning 18 yen a year as he is - that's not going to change significantly, If he studies, he can earn 70 yen a year. It will take 5 years to get the education he wants - but it's worth it. But right as he is, the family is right too - if he leaves, they will have a serious problem being able to feed their children. And when he leaves, the other boys will decide they have to leave - with 3 kids too young to work, plus grandparents, things will be bad. Naruse clearly sees this dilemma - clearly understands that the boy is more right - but he does justice to the other side... The second remarkable thing is the war. It's 1939: watching it now, it is hard to ignore the fact that all the talk about who works and who studies will be swept away in a year or so - all four of these working class kids are probably going to be shipped off to China or the Pacific islands to die. The war pokes up through the story a couple times - the little kids are constantly playing with guns; the older kids play with guns, or dream of the war. It's hard to say how this was meant - the effect now is to remind us where things were going, what was at stake. The film feels terribly prescient...

Flowing - another ensemble story, this time in a geisha house. A group of characters - a talented and beautiful geisha, who's just a little too romantic to hold her own, tries to run the place, and keep things together; her daughter is hard-headed, practical, outspoken; one sister is a money-lender, the other is a layabout; two other geisha work with them - one young, foolish, careless - the other aging, a gossip (a wonderful comic character - played by Haruko Sugimura, who was a great comic actress, frequently for Ozu, as well as Naruse...) They are plagued by the uncle of a former geisha at the house - they cheated her, he is there to collect...Things crumble, but they keep it together during the movie at least...

The Sound of the Mountain - adaptation of a Kawabata novel about a man flirting with his daughter-in-law, while his son behaves like a brute toward a series of women. Setsuko Hara and So Yamamura star, with Ken Uehara as the wretch of a son - all are superb, especially Hara. A subtle and beautiful film, capturing the feel of Kawabata - the strange moments in his books, the symbolism (the Noh mask the father buys...) A very great film.

The Wanderer's Notebook - biography of Fumiko Hayashi, author of many books about the suffering of women, the source of many of Naruse's films. Based on her first novel, which told her life story to that point. Starring, again, Hideko Takamine - who plays Hayashi in a distinctive and rather wonderful way. She's got a strange slink to her in this film - a way of looking at things that expresses her intelligence and anger at her misery. She also gets some fine chances to go wild - a couple drunk scenes, a couple wild bar scenes, singing, dancing, raising hell. Another fine movie - in scope, lush black and white... Nice stuff.

And that's that. There are two more at the Museum of Fine Arts not shown yet - Scattered Clouds (Naruse's final film) and Tsuruhachi and Tsurujiro, from the 1930s. There are also several films there that have already been shown at the Harvard Film Archive. I look forward to seeing these films again (Lightning, Wife Be Like a Rose, Mother) - their richness tends to emerge on repeated viewings. This has been a wonderful series - I hope these films are shown around the country, and I hope some of them at least make it out on DVD. There have been a few new DVD editions of Ozu films out since the major restoration of his films a couple years ago. Naruse is almost as deserving....