The film focuses on Shizuka’s relationship to her son, Shizuo. Shizuka, a widow, is the mistress of Hashimoto Oenzo, a well-to-do banker, while Shizuo is married to his daughter, Yumiko. Shizuka’s relationship to Denzo provides her with no sexual satisfaction, while Shizuo’s relations with Yumiko are similarly unsatisfactory. Mother and son are seen to share the most profound erotic compulsion toward each other, which manifests itself first in a series of flashbacks. Shizuo remembers bathing with his mother; playing by a stream with friends when his mother calls him from a bridge; following his mother to the small house where she carries on her liaison with Denzo (thus telling us that this affair began before his father’s death from tuberculosis); his parents kissing in his father’s hospital bed. Shizuka remembers many of these scenes as well, in addition to her memory of her husband’s final moments. The erotic compulsion felt by mother and son climaxes when Shizuo goes into his mother’s bedroom carrying a bottle of sleeping pills and talks to her of shinju, lovers’ suicide. He lays his head on her breast; she throws her head back in a swoon of ecstasy, the camera rocking back and forth like a pendulum. A fade to black hides the next activity (including the possibility of incest and then double suicide). The next morning we see that mother and son did not commit suicide as Shizuka and Denzo take a drive to the country in his car. The car is discovered later, crashed into a tree, Denzo dead at the wheel. Shizuka has drowned in the lake, her shoes and umbrella floating on the surface of the water. Shizuo, meanwhile, following the (implied) incest with his mother, has drawn closer to Yumiko. The film’s final shot shows Shizuo clinging tight to Yumiko as they search for Shizuka’s body. —CultCine.com
A legendary figure of the postwar Japanese cinema, Yoshishige Yoshida (b. 1933) is one of Japan’s most artistically ambitious, politically astute and influential filmmakers. Yoshida is best known for his work with the spellbinding Mariko Okada (b. 1934), one of the most beloved and celebrated actresses of her generation, and one of the great stars of the Japanese New Wave. Working together with Okada, Yoshida created an incredible body of films unparalleled for their formal sophistication, philosophical depth and sheer beauty. Underappreciated in this country, Yoshida is rightly considered in Japan and Europe, and especially France, among the preeminent masters of the modern Japanese art film.
Yoshida’s first passion, and the focus of his studies at Tokyo University, was French existential philosophy and literature, a training which deeply informs the intellectual rigor of his subsequent film work and later writing on film and art. By chance, or destiny, Yoshida was drawn into… read more
Mariko Okada, who I loved in two of Ozu's later movies Late Autum and An Autumn Afternoon, is the star of this New Wave melodrama which is stripped of any artifice by the director Yoshida who just happens to be Okada's husband! This husband and wife team have made at least a dozen movies together and this is the first I have seen. I have to say I found its story of a possibly incestuous relationship a little cold....
Mad heads be sleepin' on this joint yo! Also, perhaps a plot description that doesn't spoil practically half of the movie would be good? AllMovie guide is run by such jerks.
I was expecting (and fearing) this to be a virtuosistic movie; now I can gladly say that even its weirdest shots are a perfect rendition of the carachters state of mind and feelings. It makes me think how many times great cinema lies not in a profound plot but in a nuanced capture of the surface of things.
