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This ensemble piece recounts the lives of a family of farmers by interweaving several different storylines. Holding these stories together is the central figure of a young war widow torn between maintaining her independence and the necessity of remarrying. This is a familiar predicament for Naruse’s heroines, but the film represents a change of pace for the director in many other ways. For one thing, it is his first widescreen color film. Also, while the typical Naruse film takes place in the city, even if its characters often journey into the countryside, here the setting is resolutely rural. The result traces change in postwar Japan (another typical Naruse concern) from the point of view of the farming peasantry, as land reform and economic growth exacerbate the generation gap between restless youngsters and their tradition-bound elders.
Naruse Mikio (1905-1969) is widely regarded as one of the giants of pre-New Wave Japanese cinema. But unlike his contemporaries Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu, his films remain largely unseen in this country. This relative obscurity is ironic considering that Naruse’s WIFE, BE LIKE A ROSE! (1935) was the first Japanese film to have a theatrical release here. In place of Kurosawa’s bravado and Mizoguchi’s melodrama, Naruse’s films are shot through with an austere but lyric stoicism presented with a sublime simplicity.
Naruse grew up in dire poverty, quitting school at the age of 15 to go to work following the death of his father. More or less by chance, he ended up working in the prop department of major studio Shochiku, gradually working his way up the ladder throughout the 1920s as he absorbed the craft of filmmaking. He began directing silent films there in 1930 but soon moved to Photo-Chemical Laboratories (PCL) when his ambitious attempts at experiment with film form found no support at Shochiku. At PCL Naruse made his first major film, WIFE, BE LIKE A ROSE! Shortly after this success, his marriage to actress Chiba Sachiko began to fall apart, and his career fell into a slump (which Naruse attributed to the breakup) that lasted through the 1940s.
In the 1950s and 1960s, he hit his stride at Toho with a string of “woman’s films.” Unlike the formal innovation of his pre-war films, Naruse’s later masterpieces display a supremely simple and profoundly moving visual style. While before the war Naruse typically wrote his own scripts, this later phase of his career is typified by collaborations with women screenwriters, often adapting the work of women authors, especially Hayashi Fumiko. (Five of the films in our retrospective are adapted from her work.)
Like his contemporaries Ozu and Mizoguchi, Naruse again and again presents female protagonists in his examinations of Japan’s rapid social change. Like the women in Sirk’s melodramas, Naruse’s female protagonists are constantly aware of their precarious economic and social situation. While Ozu’s camera gazes serenely as tradition is replaced by modernity, Naruse adopts a tough-minded pessimism, perhaps determined by his unhappy childhood. As critic Audie Bock puts it, “There are no happy endings for Naruse, but there are incredibly enlightened defeats.” The Archive is proud to present this touring retrospective of an underappreciated master on the centennial of his birth, featuring new prints from Toho.
