Released in 1956, in between Sudden Rain and Flowing, starring Hideko Takamine, and the second and last Naruse film to feature Toshirô Mifune (the first was 1950's Conduct Report on Professor Ishinaka).I did the subtitle timings. Big thanks once again to Glynford for providing the television broadcast and the English transcript. Here's what Slant Magazine's Keith Uhlich has to say about it (SPOILERS!):Quote:The best moments of A Wife's Heart involve things not said or seen and this is most explicit in the interactions between Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine) and her bank clerk bachelor confidant Kenkichi (Toshiro Mifune). Kiyoko, along with her husband Shinji (Keiju Kobayashi), wants to open a coffee shop and so goes to Kenkichi to ask for a loan. Director Mikio Naruse never focuses on the duo's talk of money; as filmed, their entire relationship is a series of beginnings and endings with the middles cut out. It is at first purely a business association, though after Shinji (at the manipulative behest of his matchmaker mother) gives a majority of the loan to his deadbeat brother Zenichi, Kiyoko starts to think that her feelings for Kenkichi may be more then platonic. Following through on his setup, Naruse never lets either character nakedly confess their heart's desire. The closest they come is during a sequence, set against the backdrop of a torrential downpour, where Kenkichi utters the first few words of a thought that he will never finish. In other hands this scene might have played as masochistic repression, but Naruse allows the rainstorm to act as an expressive emotional outlet—nature thus concludes what Kenkichi cannot.And Naruse expert and filmmaker Dan Sallitt (also SPOILERS!):Quote:Small, well-constructed, and really quite good. We get a lot of subtext right off the bat, as the "happy" Takamine-Kobayashi marriage functions on such a purely practical level that its absences are conspicuous. When she finds love outside the marriage, Takamine is so predisposed to snap that her husband's decisive demonstration of decency does nothing but create a bitter sense of obligation in her. So the conventional "marriage tested and restored" plot, complete with the hope of financial success at the end, is actually a cover for a mirror-image "happiness promised and withdrawn" emotional dynamic that is as fully worked out as one could want. Takamine is very good, throwing in a particularly nice impression of a stereotypical cheerful hostess in the restaurant scenes; many directors would present such flexibility of self-presention as insincerity, but Naruse always accepts it as natural and never underlines it. The high-profile conflict over money with Kobayashi's family turns out to be just a warm-up test for the couple, but it is one of Naruse's scariest depictions of familial pressure.Enjoy!
