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Mikio Naruse opens on a tour of Asakusa street markets, and since it's his first talkie he accentuates the clear sound of a rock hammering a sandal's snapped strap. (Other notable uses of the new technique include off-screen gargling and a skipping Victrola.) Show business is an arduous trade, the middle-aged miser (Chitose Hayashi) lords over a stable of entertainers that includes her own daughters, "you can break an arm, but you always need to take care of your samisen." The middle sister (Masako Tsutsumi) strolls in and out of bars to face an alternately disinterested and lecherous clientele, the youngest one (Ryuko Umezono) is a cabaret chorine with a prosperous suitor (Heihachiro Okawa). Having flown the coop, the eldest one (Chikako Hosokawa) divides herself as a devoted homemaker for a tubercular salaryman (Osamu Takizawa) and a hard-boiled moll for underworld ruffians. "Just like in a play, or something." Yasunari Kawabata melancholy visualized in a riot of camera movements and montages and focus-outs and transition filters, a panoply curiously akin to Cromwell's in Of Human Bondage. The aural plane proceeds from tentative to sophisticated, musical numbers are prevalent when people regularly hum and whistle, and there's the dolorous silence of a singer with a busted instrument. Characters carry Pocket Cinema booklets as passing distractions, only for the melodrama they live in to veer into gangster territory. Naruse notes in spades: The little shrug the heroine gives after posing for an impromptu picture, the vanishing smile of a medicine pitchwoman when asked for a free sample, the ingénue's half-joking yearning for oblivion aboard a rowboat ("If only my mother had been kind enough to commit suicide with her children...") The director saves his deepest effect for the final tableau of sacrifice and resignation, a chugging locomotive doubling for the soul departing in the waiting room. With Chisato Matsumoto, Masako Sanjo, and Mariyo Matsumoto. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |