As a Wife, As a Woman

Tsuma to shite onna to shite

Japan

1961

106 Min

Color

2.35:1

Japanese

Currently 4.4/5 Stars.
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SCR Toshirô Ide, Zenzo Matsuyama

CAST Hideko Takamine, Chikage Awashima, Masayuki Mori, Yuriko Hoshi, Tatsuya Nakadai, Kumi Mizuno, Keiko Awaji, Chôko Iida, Yatsuko Tan'ami, Chieko Nakakita, Chieko Seki, Murasaki Fujima, Natsuko Kahara, Reiko Niimura, Hisao Toake, Kenzaburo Osawa, Nobuo Nakamura

Keijiro and Ayako Kono (Masayuki Mori and Chikage Awashima) seem like a picture-book upper middle-class family. He is a respected professor and the couple has two amiable children (a high school-aged girl and middle school-aged boy). But the Kono’s domestic siutuation is more complicated than it seems on the surface. The children are actually the illegitimate children of Kono’s long-time mistress, Miho (Hideko Takamine). To compensate for giving up the children, the Konos subsidize a bar which Miho operates. Ayako, interested in eliminating her husband’s continuing interest in Miho, pays the bar girls to “spy” on Miho, in the hope of showing Miho is not “faithful” to her husband. Miho becomes tired of the situation, and proposes that she break off relations with Kono but be given outright owner ship of the bar. After Ayako flatly rejects this (not wanting to bear the expense), Miho’s mother (played by the delightfully redoubtable Choko Iida) suggests that, for leverage, Miho demand the children back. This proposal infuriates Ayako, and she decides to sell the bar out from under Miho. Miho retaliates by telling her son (who thinks she is only a somewhat engaging but disreputable friend of her parents) about his true parentage. He comes home distraught and locks himself into his room; when his big sister persuades him to let her in, he tells her the truth in turn. The two children angrily reject all three “parents”. Afterwards, Miho and her mother are seen packing up their belongings, in preparation for a move to more humble quarters and a new job as operators of a street vendor stall. Miho’s mother nonetheless sings cheerfully as she packs. To Miho’s complaint that singing is out of place under the circumstances, her mother replies that she likes to sing – and things can’t be helped by not singing. As the final scene, we see the two children in different school uniforms at a new school, it appears that they demanded to be sent away to boarding school – so as to avoid having to deal (at least for a while) with the problematic adults in their lives. —IMDb Review

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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