Anzukko

Japan

1958

110 Min

Black and White

2.35:1

Japanese

Currently 4.0/5 Stars.
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SCR Sumie Tanaka, Mikio Naruse, Saisei Murô

CAST Sô Yamamura, Kyôko Kagawa, Isao Kimura, Keiju Kobayashi, Daisuke Katô, Shizue Natsukawa, Yoichi Tachikawa, Yû Fujiki, Yoshio Tsuchiya, Chieko Nakakita, Natsuko Kahara, Nobuo Nakamura, Sadako Sawamura, Kenji Sahara, Minoru Chiaki

Director Mikio Naruse has admitted to going through a dark period as a younger man and his 1958 film Anzukko (the first he is credited with writing after 1950’s White Beast) seems, in part, his way of dealing with the tortures of his past. In Ryokichi Urshiyama (Isao Kimura), a struggling writer who, over the course of the film, sinks into a vicious cycle of despair and drunkenness, Naruse creates a vividly unsympathetic on-screen surrogate. He’s a character as much cursed by fate as by his own inadequacies, a constant failure who takes out his frustrations on those around him and who is never redeemed. In a late sequence, Ryokichi jealously destroys the garden of his successful novelist father-in-law Heishiro (Sô Yamamura), then breaks down and cries before quickly renouncing all responsibility for his actions. Such is his circuitous, sorrowful behavior throughout, nearly one-dimensional in its predictability and repetitions, yet Naruse clearly has an affinity and understanding for this character who many would no doubt toss aside without a second thought.

Naruse examines his own faults and fears through Ryokichi, though he also considers the reverberating effects of the character’s actions. In truth, Anzukko is less Ryokichi’s story than it is his long-suffering wife Kyoko’s (Kyôko Kagawa). Naruse details the couple’s courtship in the film’s romantic and intoxicating first half-hour, as the characters ride bicycles and speak their minds against a series of mountain-town backdrops photographed in crisp, naturalistic black and white. As is typical in late Naruse, the setting is post-World War II, though the mood is decidedly—as it turns out, deceptively—less bleak. Kyoko’s parents are well off, seemingly old-fashioned (especially when it comes to courtship rituals), yet desirous, nonetheless, of their daughter’s happiness over all else. And yet when Kyoko finally marries Ryokichi it is this very push-and-pull between the traditional and the progressive (mirroring, I’d suggest, Japan’s indeterminate post-war mentality) that leaves her character in a kind of spirited, yet submissive limbo. —Keith Uhlich

Director

Mikio Naruse

Mikio Naruse is one of the least known of Japan’s early master directors, both in the West and in Japan, yet he created some of the most moving, darkly beautiful works in Japanese cinema. Like Kenji Mizoguchi, Naruse showed an uncanny understanding for the psychology of women. Like Yasujiro Ozu, he preferred subtle shifts of character over broad strokes of plot. Unlike either of these early greats, however, Naruse’s vision of humanity was much darker and more clinical. He stripped all vestiges of hope or acceptance from his films, what remains is only a willful struggle to endure. His relentlessly negative view of human existence has resulted in Naruse’s often being labeled a nihilist.

Born in Tokyo, in 1905, Naruse was the youngest of three sons of a desperately poor embroiderer. Although he excelled in elementary school, his family could not afford to further his education. He was instead enrolled in a two-year technical school. There, he spent virtually all of his free time… read more

Mikio Naruse is one of the least known of Japan’s early master directors, both in the West and in Japan, yet he created some of the most moving, darkly beautiful works in Japanese cinema. Like Kenji Mizoguchi, Naruse showed an uncanny understanding for the psychology of women. Like Yasujiro Ozu, he preferred subtle shifts of character over broad strokes of plot. Unlike either of these early greats, however, Naruse’s vision of humanity was much darker and more clinical. He stripped all vestiges of hope or acceptance from his films, what remains is only a willful struggle to endure. His relentlessly negative view of human existence has resulted in Naruse’s often being labeled a nihilist.

Born in Tokyo, in 1905, Naruse was the youngest of three sons of a desperately poor embroiderer. Although he excelled in elementary school, his family could not afford to further his education. He was instead enrolled in a two-year technical school. There, he spent virtually all of his free time reading borrowed books from the library. Soon after he graduated in 1920, his father died. At age 15, Naruse had no choice but to work. He found employment at the newly founded Shochiku company as a prop man. During this same time, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu rose, within three years, from lowly apprentices to directors. Excessively modest and painfully shy, Naruse rose through the studio’s ranks more slowly. After eight years as an assistant director to Heinosuke Gosho and Yoshinobu Ikeda, he got the chance to direct an uncharacteristic slapstick comedy called Chambara Fufu.

Naruse reached his creative peak in the early ‘50s, working primarily, like Ozu, in the genre of domestic drama or shomen-geki. His films are populated with proud, willful women who find themselves searching for dignity in desperate circumstances, only to find false promises and continuing degradation. Unlike typical Ozu heroines who are both trusting and innocent, Naruse’s characters are stubborn, experienced, and self-aware. They are women who knowingly enter doomed relationships, as in Ukigumo; barmaids who struggle to support their children, as in Ginza Gensho; or aged geishas who try to resist a decline into prostitution, as in Nagareru. Yet they continue to struggle and endure in spite of their bleak prospects. While Ozu punctuates his films with long static shots that invoke a sense of transcendence, Naruse shoots his actors close-up in confined spaces. His claustrophobic aesthetic seems to deny the possibility, not just of transcendence, but even of communication or happiness. Such Naruse masterpieces as Meshi, Mother, Late Chrysanthemums, and Ukigumo rely on subtle changes of expression to create brilliantly nuanced studies of these remarkable and desperate women. —AMCTV.com

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