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"If it isn't land tilted up, let me die the death of the unrighteous," says Twain's Tumble Bug. She's born in the dead of winter, mom (Sumie Sasaki) is the village tramp and stepdad (Kazuo Kitamura) is the village idiot, a rural Japan of bastard cycles and libidinous paroxysms. As a young woman (Sachiko Hidari) during the war, she's raped by the landowner, turns labor rouser, muddles through Tokyo crowds. From military household to temple, from temple to brothel. (Virgins are valuable items, a dab of kitty blood is enough to fool clients.) "I spur my weak body on to toil / I count my money through bitter tears." A direct expression of Shohei Imamura's entomological side, practically a Wellman-Stanwyck Warners saga given the New Waver's meticulously disordered compositions and sense of detached awe at female forces. A religious sect is just a spot for the madam to scoop up new talent, the heroine usurps her racket following a police raid and rises and falls in the industrialized Fifties and westernized Sixties, a most ruthless entrepreneur. ("Demon" and "monster" to colleagues, "the sumo grand champion" to sugar-daddies.) The daughter (Jitsuko Yoshimura) learns her lessons of survival all too well, three generations (with the next on the way) in the flow of nature and history. Buxom mountain gods, political protests and vinyl noses, flurries of activity caught in smudged freeze-frames. The grotesque leaks into the poignant, Imamura wouldn't want it any other way: The protagonist squeezes breast milk for the stepfather on his deathbed, background right finds her daughter turned away under a bare light bulb and background left has a crone set in profile against a door open into blinding snow. "Talk about hale and healthy!" Grasshopper to queen bee to grousing roach on a rocky road, revisited by Fassbinder as an exploding lynx (The Marriage of Maria Braun). With Emiko Aizawa, Masumi Harukawa, Tanie Kitabayashi, Asao Koike, Hiroyuki Nagato, and Shoichi Ozawa. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |