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The overture gives a miniature city symphony with pull-down shades for cuts and proto-Nino Rota brass, along with a pregnant little joke on misconception. ("Phooey. Thought it was a love letter," gripes the errand boy looking over a colleague's shoulder and finding a grocery list.) The office worker (Sachiko Chiba) signals her modernity by tugging at the lapel hankie on her westernized suit, her beau (Heihachiro Okawa) is a hungry fellow struggling to keep up his half of their repartee. Mom the poetess (Tomoko Ito) has an abrupt way with inspiration, her verses yearn for marital ideals since her husband (Sadao Maruyama) left to live with a mistress. Heading to the countryside to retrieve Dad, the heroine expects a gold-digger by his side and is met by a hard-working hairdresser (Yuriko Hanabusa) supporting a quixotic prospector. "A farce." "A tragedy." Experimenting with technique, smudging emotional dialectics, detecting thorns in roses—Mikio Naruse already in full sway. Fleet camera movements and aural bridges are prevalent in the early scenes, darting POV shots spot and lose the father wandering through Tokyo. Gidayu songs are the latest passion of the uncle (Kamatari Fujiwara), "something interesting and short" is the request, the lugubrious performance gets intercut with the restless inhabitants of a birdcage. The bucolic interlude sobers up the urban fizz, the daughter's assumptions are upended by the alternate family mirror yet she insists on bringing Dad home for a reconciliation. Saké bars and calligraphy exhibits, kagamijishi dances and reenactments of It Happened One Night, a full day of desperate fun to discover the parents have become "like strangers." Nothing left in the end but the ruins of the romanticized domestic image, and the realization that Naruse arrived at the bitterest of places with the lightest of touches. "Direct expression is best." With Setsuko Horikoshi, Chikako Hosokawa, and Kaoru Ito. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |