The office worker Atsumi Kozi and his adult son are both heavy drinkers. A grave accident occurs during one of their drinking bouts. This social satire examines why people drink. Whereas a comedic tone prevails in the first half, the movie develops into a scathing indictment of a society that is willing to accept such behavior. Ryu Chishu’s drinker is a typical Shibuyan figure of excess – his twisted body and exaggerated drunkenness epitomize the whole cruelty of life. —Berlin International Film Festival
Minoru Shibuya (渋谷実 Shibuya Minoru?, 2 January 1907 – 20 December 1980) was a Japanese film director.
Born in Tokyo, Shibuya attended Keiō University but left before graduating.He joined Shochiku in 1930 and worked as an assistant under Yasujirō Ozu, Mikio Naruse, and Heinosuke Gosho, before making his debut as a director in 1937.Shibuya “worked with equal facility in comedy and melodrama, [and] made his mark as an ironic but compassionate chronicler of the difficulties of the early postwar period”.
One notable film was The Radish and the Carrot, which was supposed to be Ozu’s next film before he died. But as the critic Chris Fujiwara notes, Shibuya’s “films are a world apart from Ozu: harsh, sometimes strident, in tone, splashed with dark humor, tending to contort the human body or thrust it into the bottoms of violently modernist compositions”.
He directed over four dozen films between 1937 and 1966. —Wikipedia
