Two Early Films by Ozu, Part 2

There Was a Father (1942)

***^½

Country: Japan

Director: Yasujiro Ozu



After The Only Son, Ozu made one more film before being drafted into the Japanese Army. During World War Two he completed only two films, both made in the brief interval between his service in China and Singapore. The second of his wartime films, There Was a Father, is another story of a parent's sacrifices to get an education for a child and the consequences of that decision. In this film Ozu regular Chishu Ryu—this was the fourteenth of thirty-three films he made with Ozu—plays a provincial school teacher, Shuhei Horikawa. When two of his students are drowned in a boating accident during a field trip he is chaperoning, Horikawa is devastated, even though the accident happened through no fault of his own, and gives up teaching. "I don't want to be responsible for other people's children anymore," he tells a colleague. "It's too frightening." Horikawa, a widower, moves back to his provincial home in Uedo with his young son, Ryohei.



During the time they spend in Uedo, Horikawa and his son develop an especially close bond, conveyed in a series of scenes of shared moments—a visit to a nearby castle, the father helping the son with his math homework, a fly-fishing trip together. So when Horikawa sends Ryohei away to boarding school and later moves to Tokyo and gets a job in a textile factory so that he can continue to pay for his son's education, both feel the separation acutely, but especially Ryohei. The passage of the next thirteen years is succinctly limned in a series of brief scenes—Horikawa telling a colleague his son has graduated from high school, then from college, then become a teacher at a technical school. At the same time, Horikawa has progressed from a job on the factory floor to an executive post in the company's offices. About midway through, the film finally focuses on a reunion visit by the adult Ryohei to his father in Tokyo and the events surrounding this visit, which include a fly-fishing trip that mirrors the one in the early part of the picture.



During the visit Ryohei reveals that he wants to resign his teaching job and move to Tokyo to be near his father. "I can't stand living apart like this," he explains. Horikawa, though, is horrified by Ryohei's plan, telling him that the duty of every teacher is to be a good role model for students (perhaps amplifying his own reason for leaving the teaching profession, that he feels he failed to be a good role model for his students). "Our duty is to our jobs," he tells his son. "There is no room for personal relationships." This message of blind obedience to duty and paternal authority must have been a welcome one to the Japanese government and military during World War Two, when the obligation of every citizen was seen to be loyalty to the emperor's will. Ozu and leading man Chishu Ryu, however, manage to make Horikawa's actions seem less like wartime propaganda than observations about the attitudes of a certain type of character.



Ozu's postwar films—he didn't make another picture until 1947, five years after There Was a Father—tend to be remarkably consistent both in style and in subject. While neither The Only Son nor There Was a Father exactly establishes a template for Ozu's later work, elements found in both point ahead to the direction Ozu would take in his postwar films.



In their general outline, the plots of these films are quite alike: parent makes sacrifices for child's education, parent and child endure a painful separation, parent and child are reunited in the big city, parent and child come into conflict over the child's attitudes. This similarity is perhaps understandable, since the original script for There Was a Father was written only a year or so after the completion of The Only Son. Although the organization of There Was a Father in many ways parallels that of The Only Son, there are important differences between the two. The Only Son technically takes place over a period of twelve years, but the interval between these two times is covered in one cut between two scenes, and the emphasis is clearly on the later time. The first part of the film is quite brief, essentially an introductory passage used to set up the main part of the film, the visit of the mother to Tokyo, which is then presented as a simple linear narrative without subplots or narrative digressions.



In contrast, the early part of There Was a Father, when Ryohei is a boy, is developed in far greater detail than in The Only Son. This gives us a much stronger sense of the intimacy of the bond between parent and child, and of the child's feelings of loss when the two are separated. The middle part of the plot, which covers a period of thirteen years, is also given much more detail than the corresponding section of The Only Son, which is essentially an ellipsis. In There Was a Father, this bridge between the two main parts of the narrative seems particularly dense with Ozu's trademark pillow shots*, used as transitional devices between the several time periods covered. The final section of There Was a Father doesn't last as long as the equivalent section of The Only Son, which occupies nearly the entire running time of that film, yet it contains a far more intricate plot than the simple linear narrative of The Only Son.



Compared to The Only Son, There Was a Father shows a clear advance in Ozu's skill with integrating image and sound, in particular the way he uses dialogue to fashion a much more complex screenplay, succinctly using a single scene, or even a single line of dialogue, between two characters as a way for them to express their emotions to each other, or to describe important changes that occur over a number of years. But if Ozu used sound and dialogue to expand the scope of the narrative in There Was a Father, he didn't pursue this direction of narrative sprawl after the war. None of the later Ozu films I've seen covers such a long period of time as There Was a Father. Instead Ozu returned to the restricted focus on time and place of earlier films like The Only Son, using conversations between characters to fill in background events. Still, within this concentrated focus, he reproduced the surprisingly complicated narrative line of that last section of There Was a Father, with its compressed structure, frequently shifting point of view, and almost literary blend of plot and subplot.



One thing that sets both The Only Son and There Was a Father apart from Ozu's later films is the way he portrays the parent-child bond. In those two early films, he shows us stern but not unsympathetic parents and dutiful, compliant children. His postwar films present a much less idealized vision of the parent-child relationship. Just as Ozu's later films often touch on the cultural changes in postwar Japanese society, they also tend to dwell on the changing attitudes of parents and children—in particular, grown children—toward their traditional roles. Children may be too obedient and dependent for their own good and their parents troubled by their excessive devotion, as in Late Spring and its semi-remake Late Autumn. Or conversely, the children may be self-absorbed and aloof, as in Tokyo Story, or alienated and sullen like the illegitimate son in Floating Weeds. Time and again, young children are portrayed not as docile youngsters like Ryosuke in The Only Son and Ryohei in There Was a Father, but as ill-behaved brats. Parents too are often shown in an unflattering way, for example the erratic and irresponsible fathers of Floating Weeds and The End of Summer.



It is said of certain directors that their films are ones that an individual viewer will either like or dislike with great intensity. Because of the similarity of Ozu's postwar films to one another—what I called their consistency of subject and style—this seems particularly true of his pictures. Watching The Only Son and There Was a Father makes one realize that the addition of sound to his distinctively rhythmic visual style permitted Ozu to explore in ever more subtle variations his thematic preoccupation with the bond between parents and children and with the ways the changes in postwar Japanese culture affected how parents and children relate to each other. These two early sound films are essential viewing for anyone who wants to understand how Ozu arrived at the style of his great postwar films.





*Ozu created a unique visual style that he followed with little variation for his entire career. One of the defining features of his style and the visual device Ozu is best known for is his pillow shots. These are brief, lyrical montages of a few images that generally occur at transitional points. Sometimes they are used in a loosely narrative sense to indicate the passage of time or, rather like the establishing shots in Western films, a change of locale. At other times they are used in a more abstract way, to suggest a certain mood or tone that corresponds to the narrative, although not exactly in a literal sense. Certain images are often repeated from one set of pillow shots to another. These pillow shots are found in both The Only Son and There Was a Father, as they are in every Ozu movie I've seen. But There Was a Father has far more of these passages than I have seen in any other of Ozu's films, and I think the reason can be found in the intricacy of the film's plot, with its many narrative and tonal shifts. Below are two pillow shots, one from The Only Son (left) and one from There Was a Father (right).























I am a tireless proselytizer for the films of Ozu, and I think anyone with a serious interest in cinema, especially foreign cinema, should give him a try. If you've never seen a picture directed by Ozu, I suggest starting with Tokyo Story (1953), probably his most accessible film for those unacquainted with his work. You might also be interested in my post from a couple of years ago on Ozu's last three films. Click here to read it. To read Part 1 of this post, on Ozu's The Only Son (1936), click here.

Two Early Films by Ozu, Part 1

The Only Son (1936)

***^½

Country: Japan

Director: Yasujiro Ozu





The Only Son was the thirty-sixth of fifty-four films Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) directed in his lifetime and his first sound film. Originally conceived and partially shot as a silent, it was reconceived as a sound picture and the original footage reshot with sound. "Even though I was well aware that talkies were a totally different ballgame, I couldn't help slipping back into [the] style of silents," Ozu said of his experience making this film. Compared to Ozu's later movies, The Only Son does seem to have a stripped-down, simplified narrative, and the dialogue in the film does seem almost entirely functional, as though Ozu had not yet fully assimilated how to use dialogue to convey greater complexity of plot and exposition than was practical in the silent cinema. Yet the picture fits comfortably into Ozu's later filmography, showing his amazing mastery of the visual element of filmmaking and focusing on themes that Ozu would continue to explore for the rest of his career.



The Only Son opens with a quotation from the Japanese short story writer Ryunosuke Akutagawa (he wrote the story that Kurosawa's Rashomon is based on): "Life's tragedy begins with the bond between parent and child." This statement could almost sum up not only the theme of this movie, but the theme of practically every movie of Ozu's I've ever seen, for the bond between parents and children is a subject he explored in film after film. Even though in his films it rarely results in tragedy, the perilous relationship between parent and child does often lead to anxiety, sadness, and disappointment, as it does in The Only Son. The film opens in 1923 in the home of Tsune Nonomiya, a widowed mother, and her young son, Ryosuke, in the countryside. The boy, who has just left elementary school, presses his mother to let him continue to middle school, and she tells him she can't afford to. After the boy's teacher unexpectedly visits Tsune and tells her that Ryosuke has already told his classmates he will be attending middle school, she is furious. Later she relents and does send him away to continue his education as a boarder even though it means great financial hardship for her.



After this brief introductory sequence, the film moves forward twelve years. Ryosuke is now a teacher living in Tokyo with his wife and infant son, and Tsune is making her first visit to Tokyo. The rest of the picture deals with the few days she spends there with her son. Her image of her son as a successful young urban professional is soon destroyed, however, as it quickly becomes clear that Ryosuke's job is one of little prestige and that he lives in a shabby neighborhood barely scraping by on his low salary. Just to feed his mother and keep her entertained during her visit, he must beg for advances on his salary and borrow money from colleagues.



The film builds slowly to two key scenes. As mother and son are out walking one day near the garbage incinerator for Tokyo, they sit down to rest. Both are mentally exhausted from the effort of keeping up appearances and pretending nothing is wrong, and they finally reveal to each other their true feelings about the situation. He confesses his disappointment in the way his life has turned out, his belief that he will advance no further in his career, and the guilt he feels about the effect his failure will have on his mother. She responds heatedly by denouncing his defeatist attitude and saying that all her sacrifices to put him through school—she has even sold their house and land and now lives in a tenement for employees of the textile factory where she works—were not worth it.



With relations between the two at their lowest, they prepare for one last sightseeing excursion before she returns home. Their day out is interrupted, however, when a neighbor's boy is kicked by a horse and seriously injured. Ryosuke intervenes, carrying the boy to the hospital in his arms and giving the money for the excursion to the boy's impoverished mother to help pay the medical bills. In typical Ozu fashion, the film ends not in a big emotional catharsis, but quietly, in a reflective moment of insight. After witnessing her son's altruistic behavior, Tsune realizes that the honorable values and the humanity of his inner nature are more important—and more worthy of admiration—than material success, and that in itself becomes for her a source of pride. Like so many of Ozu's movies, The Only Son reaches its climax in a moment of calm resignation and the realization that even a small satisfaction in life is something to be grateful for.



Next week I'll be writing about There Was a Father (1942), one of two films Ozu made during World War Two. It and The Only Son were recently released by Criterion as a box set.

Scandal (1950)

***
Country: Japan
Director: Akira Kurosawa

While clearing off my DVR last week, I watched this early film by Kurosawa, which I had recorded last spring. I wasn't exactly sure what to expect, knowing little beyond the fact that it stars two of Kurosawa's greatest actors, Toshiro Mifune and Takashi Shimura, each of whom made many movies with the director, and is about an artist who sues a gossip magazine for libel. It turned out to be not only one of the most unusual films by Kurosawa I've ever seen, but—and this was purely by accident, since I wasn't aware of it in advance—perhaps the oddest Christmas-themed movie I've ever come across.

The film stars the young Mifune as a pipe-smoking, motorcycle-riding artist. While out painting in the mountains, he encounters a concert singer (played by Yoshiko Yamaguchi, who was billed as Shirley Yamaguchi when she made House of Bamboo for Samuel Fuller a few years later) who has missed her bus and offers her a ride on his motorcycle to a nearby country inn. The two spend a chaste night at the inn in separate rooms. But two paparazzi who work for a scandal magazine called Amour spot the famous singer and sneak a picture of her and Mifune relaxing on the balcony of her room in their kimonos. The magazine publishes the photo and a wholly concocted story about the pair being caught spending a dirty weekend. Motivated partly by gallantry and partly by sheer stubbornness, the outraged artist is persuaded to sue the magazine after being visited by a shabby lawyer played by Takashi Shimura.

The second part of the film shifts the focus to Shimura, who pulls out all the stops in his extravagant performance as the lawyer. This is a man who at first appears to be a charmingly comic eccentric but is soon revealed to be a deeply flawed person, a man who gambles compulsively, drinks too much, is considered a washed-up failure and object of ridicule by others, and is consumed with self-loathing. Egged on in his gambling by the sleazy editor of Amour, he accumulates large debts then accepts money from the editor to pay his debts, in effect being bribed to lose the case. The lawyer also has a long-suffering wife and a teenaged daughter gravely ill with tuberculosis. The painter and singer become involved with the family and give the daughter a Christmas to remember while she dispenses optimistic platitudes like a bedridden Tiny Tim. You haven't lived until you've seen Mifune riding through the slums of postwar Tokyo with a fully decorated Christmas tree on the back of his motorcycle as "Jingle Bells" plays on the soundtrack. This sequence also contains Yamaguchi singing "Silent Night" to the daughter with Mifune accompanying her on a pump organ. Later that same night Mifune and Shimura visit a squalid dive called The Red Cat, where the two proceed to get rip-roaring drunk while the house combo plays "Buttons and Bows" and the drunken Shimura ends up leading the entire club in a maudlin rendition of "Auld Lang Syne."

The third part of the movie deals with the libel trial. Suborned by the editor of the magazine, Shimura is torn between the hold the editor has over him and his duty to his clients. Things look pretty bleak for Mifune and Yamaguchi, and the question becomes whether the lawyer will go through with his plans to lead the case to defeat or have a last-minute change of heart and reveal his unethical behavior to the court and ruin what is left of his reputation and career. To appreciate the ramifications of this dilemma fully—for both the lawyer and his clients—it's necessary to keep in mind the importance traditional Japanese culture places on saving face and the complete shame associated with dishonor.

David Thomson has written that Kurosawa is the Japanese director "most alert to Western art and American cinema in particular." One can certainly see the influence of American gangster movies and film noir in early Kurosawa films like Stray Dog and later ones like High and Low, and so closely do his well-known samurai movies resemble Westerns (his favorite movie was reportedly Stagecoach) that more than one has been remade as just that. But while watching Scandal I kept thinking of Frank Capra. Mifune's painter is as idealistic and headstrong, and in his way as naive, as Capra's Mr. Deeds and Mr. Smith. As the villain of the movie, the magazine editor is as heartless as Edward Arnold's newspaper publisher in Meet John Doe, or for that matter any of Capra's villains, a man driven by greed and the love of power and indifferent to the human cost of his actions. Kurosawa's view of the media is as negative as Capra's in several of his movies, especially Meet John Doe. The climactic trial is reminiscent of the one in Mr. Deeds, while the Christmas setting brings to mind It's a Wonderful Life. And the slow fall of Shimura as the lawyer is as poignant as George Bailey's descent into despair in It's a Wonderful Life.

While none of these things is unique to Capra, their presence together in one movie makes the similarity of Scandal to Capra's social comedies hard to overlook. It's almost as if Kurosawa sliced and diced several Frank Capra movies and threw in a pinch of A Christmas Carol for good measure. Kurosawa, however, did this with so little restraint that he makes Capra seem almost temperate in comparison. If you find Capra sentimental, you'll find Scandal downright mawkish. If you find Capra lacking in subtlety, you'll find Scandal positively overbearing. If you think Capra's heroes and heroines are conflicted, you'll find Shimura's lawyer a virtual martyr to weakness, self-pity, and hopelessness.

With its every element so overstated, Scandal has clear shortcomings that make it likely to be of greater interest to followers of the director than to the general viewer. Still, it is certainly a fascinating movie and unlike any other Kurosawa film I've seen. Vincent Canby called Scandal "a parody of Hollywood," but while watching the film, it never occurred to me for a moment that Kurosawa's intentions were anything but serious. He directs with confidence and professionalism, providing many imaginative visual touches, and parts of the film are quite affecting even if the level of pathos is often excessive.

The Music Room (1958)

****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray is probably best known for the three films in his Apu trilogy made in the late 1950s, and rightly so. But in 2008 when French directors, critics, and industry executives put together their list of the 100 best films for Cahiers du Cinéma, surprisingly, the one work of Ray's that appeared on the list (at #20) was his little-known 1958 film The Music Room, made between the second and third parts of the Apu trilogy. One of the reasons for this unexpected choice might be the subject of the film, the passing of one era and the dawning of another, a subject of perennial appeal in literature and film and one the French seem particularly drawn to. Another reason might be Ray's attitude toward the subject, which he presents without the sentimentality or nostalgia it so often inspires.

The main character—really the only major character—in the film is Huzur Biswambhar Roy (Chhabi Biswas, whose brilliant, moody performance is the film's anchor), a zamindir or landlord, whom we first meet sitting in his dressing gown smoking a hookah on the roof of his dilapidated palace overlooking the land that once belonged to his family. He is one of the last of a class of hereditary landowning gentry living off the income produced by their property. It is the 1920s, and just as in the West during the previous century, a massive redistribution of wealth and redefinition of social class is occurring. People like the Huzur (this is how others in the film refer to him) are being replaced by upwardly mobile entrepreneurs who create their own wealth rather than inheriting it. Unable to continue their genteel lifestyle any other way, these fading aristocrats gradually sell off their land to the enterprising upstarts who are replacing them as the new elite in a world where status is no longer defined by social class, but by wealth.

As the movie opens, Huzur receives a letter inviting him to the sacred thread ceremony—a Hindu rite of passage for teenage boys—of the son of a neighbor, Ganguli. Offended that the invitation has not been issued in person, as Huzur considers appropriate to his social position, he refuses to go. Sitting on the roof, he recalls his own son's sacred thread ceremony, his reverie becoming an extended flashback lasting for the first half of the film which Ray uses as a device to show how Huzur came to be in these circumstances and how he became such a disheveled wreck of a man. The flashback begins with Huzur interviewing the obsequious Ganguli, the son of a moneylender, who wants to lease Huzur's land on the nearby river bank to set up a sand quarrying business. Huzur agrees because he needs the money to pay for his own son's lavish sacred thread ceremony.

Huzur is an idle, imperious man whose one passion is music. His obsession is his jalsaghar or music room, which doubles as a shrine to his ancestors, where he spends his time gloating on his family's past glory while smoking his hookah, reading poetry, playing music, and teaching his son to love these dilettantish pursuits as he does. He is also a proud and vain man, and a wholly intractable one. Over the next few years, as the fortunes of Ganguli rise and his own decline, he becomes even more obdurate in his sense of class entitlement. Time and again his pride and vanity drive him to do foolish and self-destructive things in his attempts to preserve what he sees as the superior status he has inherited. He upstages Ganguli's plans to give a jalsa (concert) on a feast day, seeing this as a usurpation of his right as a landowner, by impulsively scheduling a concert on the same day, even though he must pawn his wife's jewelry to finance it. He pays dearly for his triumph, though, with the deaths of his wife and son, a loss that causes him to seal up the music room and retreat inside his house.

When the music from the sacred thread ceremony of Ganguli's son draws Huzur out of his reverie and back to the present, the first thing he determines to do is reopen the music room, in a sorry state after being unused for years. When Huzur first enters the room, the camera follows his gaze around the shabby room, its carpets, bookcases, family portraits, and ornate chandelier covered in dust and spiderwebs. Walking up to a mirror, he is clearly shocked at his raddled appearance, reaching up to touch his face in disbelief. Music begins to well up on the soundtrack, as though playing in his memory. It is not his love of music reasserting itself, though, but rather his old arrogance and conceit. Still locked in rivalry with Ganguli, he suddenly decides to give another jalsa the next night to celebrate the music room's reopening. The concert is a success, but as in the previous concert, Huzur's almost manic sense of triumph ultimately leads to tragedy.

Huzur was hardly the first of Ray's characters to be petty and unlikable. All of Ray's films I've seen have characters that are in some way unsympathetic, although these people are never portrayed as outright malevolent. In Pather Panchali and Aparajito, the two films in the Apu trilogy that preceded The Music Room, for example, Apu's mother was often petulant and spiteful and his father a feckless dreamer. But the young Apu was a balancing force in those movies, his innocence and good nature offsetting unattractive qualities of some of the other characters. The Music Room, however, is essentially built around one person, and while he is not actively malicious, his churlish pride invariably brings harm to himself and others. I can't think of another Ray film where the focus is such an alarmingly self-centered character with so few redeeming features.

In his inflexibility and egotism, Huzur is a pathetic man, yet Ray treats him, as he does each character in all of his films, with the detachment and objectivity of a neutral observer. He doesn't try to explain or judge him, nor does he try to elicit unearned sympathy for him by portraying him as a victim. Still there is plainly a sense of fatalism in The Music Room. Huzur finds himself in a certain historical and cultural situation, and his nature causes him to react to that situation in a particular way. There is also a definite element of tragedy to the film. Like the characters in classical tragedy, Huzur is wholly lacking in self-awareness, and in his willfulness and blind arrogance is responsible for his ill fortune. Just as Huzur lacks sympathetic traits to temper the negative qualities in his character, the film also lacks the hopefulness that balances the tragedy in the typical Ray film, giving it a bleaker, more downbeat view of life than is the norm for Ray's work.

All this might sound quite literary, and I've written before of how strongly literature seems to inform the work of Ray. Yet despite its literary and thematic underpinnings, The Music Room has the great visual power only a master like Ray can give a film. Both of the jalsas, with their effortless synthesis of music, performance, and narrative, are tremendously sensuous set pieces. The sequence where Huzur emerges from his house after four years of seclusion is also a marvel, with Huzur seeing for the first time how much of his land has been washed away in a flood—virtually right up to the foundations of the house—as three of Ganguli's trucks rumble by in a cloud of dust. "Washed away, everything is washed away," he says, stunned, and he might be talking not just about his land, but about everything in his life.

Ray had an acute sense of the visual effect of settings, and both Huzur's decaying palace sitting in the midst of a vast expanse of naked sand and that music room, a precisely detailed representation of both the transience of the material and the transcendence of art, are impossible to forget. It's no arbitrary choice that the film opens with the credits over the music room's magnificent chandelier shown swaying in the dark with no other details of the room visible. Nor that the last big sequence of the film, the jalsa Huzur gives to mark his return from seclusion, ends with the candles in the chandelier guttering one by one after the guests have left, until finally all are extinguished and the room is in darkness as it was at the very beginning of the film. "All lights are out," Huzur mutters dispiritedly, and both he and the viewer realize how unlikely it is they will ever shine again.

The Samurai Trilogy (1954-1956)

***^½
Country: Japan
Director: Hiroshi Inagaki

The Japanese director Hiroshi Inagaki, who made seventy-five films between 1928 and 1970, is probably best known in the U.S. for Chushingura (1962). This is his version of the well-known and frequently filmed story of the forty-seven ronin, 18th-century samurai whose master has been unjustly forced by rivals to commit hara-kiri and who devise an elaborate (and suicidal) plot to exact revenge on those responsible for their master's death. Earlier than this, though, his film Samurai (1954), starring Toshiro Mifune, received an honorary Oscar as the best foreign language film released in the U.S. in 1955, the last year before this became a competitive award. In reality, Samurai is the first part of a trilogy of films about the legendary 17th-century samurai Musashi Miyamoto, played by Mifune: Musashi Miyamoto (1954), actually the correct title of the film originally released in the U.S. as Samurai; Duel at Ichijoji Temple (1955); and Duel at Ganryu Island (1956), also known as Bushido. The three are available as a boxed set from Criterion.

Each of the three films deals with one stage of the development of Musashi Miyamoto from a callow, self-interested youth to a mature man who embodies not only the physical but also the mental and spiritual virtues of the samurai. The first installment opens in A.D. 1600 in the midst of civil war. At this point Mifune is called Takezo, and we first meet him as a young man sitting in a tree in the courtyard of a monastery with his friend Matahachi watching a battle take place below. Thrilled by the excitement of what they're witnessing, the two determine to leave their native village to become samurai. Takezo, who seems to be the more dominant of the pair, is an orphan, but Matahachi leaves behind his mother and his fiancée, Otsu. Being soldiers turns out not to be the glamorous occupation the young men envisioned, though, and before long they find themselves stuck in muddy trenches on the losing side. Escaping, they take refuge with a mother and daughter who survive by stripping the bodies of dead warriors and selling their equipment. The mother sets her sights on Matahachi and soon seduces him; the daughter, Akemi, falls in love with Takezo. While Matahachi stays behind, Takezo decides to return to their village to tell Otsu of her fiancé's fate.

Because he must defy a ban on travel to get home, Takezo becomes an outlaw and fugitive. When he finally does reach the village, he develops an attachment to Otsu (which she returns) that lasts for the remainder of the cycle of films. But before he can leave the village, he is captured by the Buddhist priest Takuan, who binds him and suspends him from the very tree where we first saw him. Released into Takuan's custody, Takezo is taken to a nearby castle, where the priest lures him to a barred cell in the attics of the castle and locks him in, showing him piles of books in the room and telling him to study those books, for they contain all he needs to know. Three years later Takuan returns and releases Takezo, now reborn as Musashi Miyamoto, to take his place as a real samurai. After a final meeting with Otsu, during which she tells him she will wait for him, Musashi is last seen heading down the road and on to his destiny.

In the second film, Musashi becomes involved in a dispute with the Yoshioko martial arts school and its head, Seijuro. He also meets for the first time another warrior named Kojiro when he saves Musashi from an ambush by the warriors of the Yoshioko School. Kojiro later allies himself with the Yoshioko warriors, however, and becomes Musashi's rival. Akemi also returns in this episode, first being raped by Seijuro after her ambitious mother attempts to arrange a liaison between her daughter, still in love with Musashi, and the powerful young head of the samurai school and later taking refuge with Kojiro. In this film, Musashi spends a peaceful interlude between battles as a guest of the most famous "club" in Kyoto and its "star courtesan," the Lady Yoshino. Near the end of the film, he finally does meet Seijuro in battle at the Ichijoji Temple and defeats him. As he prepares to kill his enemy, though, Musashi has an epiphany in which he recalls in a montage of rapid flashbacks the defects in his character that several people he encountered in the past pointed out to him, an experience that persuades him to spare Seijuro's life. Just when it seems that Musashi has advanced to the next stage of his personal development, the finale of the film shows him that his education is not yet complete: His ego swollen with victory, he impulsively attempts to assault the faithful Otsu, who rebuffs his crude advances. Shocked and shamed by the brutality of his own behavior, Musashi takes off and is again last seen heading down the road and into the future.

In the final installment, many of the characters from the first two parts return: Otsu, Akemi, and most important Kojiro, now Musashi's bitter rival who challenges him to a duel on Ganryu Island. Musashi accepts the challenge but asks to postpone the duel for one year. He spends the interval with two companions he has picked up along the way, a hero-worshiping boy and a buffoonish older man, living in a rural village and becoming a farmer. Like the villagers in The Seven Samurai, these people are menaced by brigands, and Musashi finds himself organizing the farmers to defend themselves. Akemi also shows up and, after being rejected by Musashi again, betrays the village to the brigands in an outburst of wounded vanity. With Musashi's assistance, the villagers are able to repel the invaders during an exhilarating attack sequence. The climax of the film and of the trilogy comes with the duel with Kojiro on Ganryu Island. Musashi does, of course, defeat Kojiro after another rousing duel sequence on the beach. He is last seen leaving the island on a boat, but this time he is returning . . . to the ever-faithful Otsu, whom he has promised to marry if he wins the duel.

Taken together, the three films of The Samurai Trilogy offer a highly entertaining blend of thrilling action sequences, romance, and thoughtful examination of the nature of honor, personal growth, and being a samurai. The films are directed by Inagaki in a style that, while less distinctive than those of his better-known contemporaries, is still quite proficient and seems very naturalistic compared to the direction of the two heavily stylized Japanese films that also won honorary Oscars in the early 1950s, Rashomon and Gate of Hell. Inagaki makes especially good use of colorful and dramatic outdoor locations and shows great skill in staging action sequences. But if there is one thing that holds all this together, that gives the trilogy real thematic resonance and depth, it is the character of Musashi and the chronicling of his personal development. This development is the result not of physical training or even the love of Otsu, but of Musashi's own internal growth towards a moral and ethical stature he has already achieved as a fighter early in the first film.

Each of the three films concentrates on a different area of Musashi's development. Musashi Miyamoto focuses on the growth of his spiritual and intellectual awareness under the tutelage of the priest Takuan, who tells Musashi that even though he has the physical prowess of a samurai, he lacks the spiritual development of a real samurai. The priest teaches him that there is more to being a samurai than using his warrior's skills for personal advancement, that he must learn self-control and the need to direct his power to less egoistic aims. While Musashi is hanging in that tree, the priest tells him, "Conceited in your strength, you ignored wisdom and virtue. . . . Could you but use that force for humanity's good." At the end of the film, after spending three years in that cell reading and meditating, Musashi is clearly a different man, a man now prepared to accept the chivalric responsibilities that are central to being a samurai.

The second film, Duel at Ichijoji Temple, focuses on Musashi's emotional development. During Lady Yoshino's farewell to Musashi before he leaves to meet Seijuro at Ichijoji Temple, she tells him, "You're craving for self-control [because] you lack affection. Human affection." She correctly recognizes that he is incapable of real feeling for another person because in his emotional insecurity he sees affection for others as a weakness. Under the priest Takuan's guidance, Musashi has acquired self-restraint and compassion for his enemies. But having shed his youthful pride and self-absorption, he has been unable to fill the vacuum left behind with real empathy or meaningful connection with another human being, not even the patient and loving Otsu. He has not yet fully grasped that being a samurai is not just a matter of restraining negative impulses, but of generating the positive feelings towards others that will allow him to transcend the limitations of the self.

The final film, Duel at Ganryu Island, with its year-long interlude in the village, focuses on Musashi's forging of a connection with the earth and for the first time in his life becoming part of a community. In this film he finally achieves the humility that Takuan attempted to instill in him in Musashi Miyamoto. By helping the villagers to organize and repel the threat to their village, he is at last able to turn his martial skills to a good and selfless purpose, as Takuan urged, and to experience the caring affection for others that Lady Yoshino told him he lacked. His journey from the selfish desire for personal glory to the samurai's ideal of selfless service to others is complete. He is now ready to face Kojiro and afterward to accept and return the love of Otsu.

The growth and development of Musashi, the arc of his spiritual and sentimental education, is not based on quasi-mystical twaddle about the samurai code, but grounded in specific behaviors and attitudes, and one reason The Samurai Trilogy is so affecting is the way Toshiro Mifune brilliantly expresses the challenges of learning and applying those qualities. For nearly five hours, Mifune leads us step by step through the process of Musashi's gradual transition from an alienated, arrogant, and spiritually unaware young man driven by the most selfish motivations to a mature and serene man who has learned how to connect with the rest of the world and humanity. The lessons in self-awareness, self-control, and selflessness that Musashi learns in these films are surely principles applicable not just to persons of great physical skill and latent spiritual nobility like himself, but to all people, a concept which Mifune expertly conveys by showing how extraordinary ability and ordinary human fallibility can exist side by side in the same person.

I've seen Toshiro Mifune in quite a few films and consider him one of the great film actors of all time. But I don't think I've ever seen him give a finer performance than he does here. In the end, even with all the other strengths of these films, it is Mifune's sustained representation of the formation of Musashi Miyamoto's character and values that towers over all else in The Samurai Trilogy. It is a performance of the utmost subtlety, gravity, and control—one of the most remarkable screen performances I've ever seen.

The Song of the Little Road (2003)

Country: US
Director: Priyanka Kumar

Priyanka Kumar's documentary on the Indian director Satyajit Ray (1921-1992) is named in honor of the English translation of the title of Ray's first film, Pather Panchali. The seventy-minute long documentary approaches Ray's career and legacy from several angles, using interviews with experts in various fields of film studies as well as brief excerpts from Ray's films. Ray's movies are examined by Peter Rainer, film critic for the Christian Science Monitor and past president of the National Society of Film Critics, and by director Martin Scorsese, whose commitment to film preservation is well known. Both of these men, ardent admirers of Ray, offer genuinely perceptive observations about his work, in particular the great early films, which are the focus of The Song of the Little Road.

Typically, Scorsese approaches Ray from the point of view of his own personal relationship to Ray's films. Of watching the entire Apu trilogy in one sitting, Scorsese says that it "was one of the great cinema experiences" of his life and was a direct inspiration for his own early films, explaining how his realization that Ray was able to make stories so "foreign" seem "personal" made him see that he could do the same thing with the world he grew up in and was familiar with. Rainer enthusiastically calls Ray "the complete filmmaker" and credits his rediscovery of Ray's films with changing his mind about giving up film criticism as a career because of his disenchantment with contemporary movies. The two men discuss many of the most important elements of Ray's work: his humanism, the "introspective" and "meditative" quality of his films, his affinity for telling stories from a child's point of view, the almost documentary simplicity of his technique, his seamless integration of music and narrative. Interestingly, both point out the resemblance of his movies to literature: Scorsese compares watching the Apu trilogy to "reading a two thousand page novel," while Rainer observes that Ray "really does give you the kind of richness and complexity that you get from great literature."

The documentary also uses interviews with personal friends of Ray like Ismail Merchant and musician Ravi Shankar to give us a sketch of Ray the man. We learn of his modest lifestyle and of his gregariousness and sense of humor, as well as his fascination with the arts of all kinds. (His small apartment in Calcutta was virtually a salon for lovers of cinema, literature, music, and art.) We also learn of the financial problems of his film career, which were so great that he had to write novels to support his family because he earned so little from his movies. Most of the early films were made for only around sixty thousand dollars but were nevertheless difficult to finance because they were not popular in India. It was really only the success of his films with foreign audiences that allowed Ray to keep working. So great was his love of his native Bengal, though, that he turned down many offers to work abroad after he became a festival and art-house favorite, preferring to make modest movies about Bengal even if it meant scraping together financing, working with primitive equipment, and knowing that his films would never be popular at home.

Michael Pogorzelsky, director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences archives (Ray received an honorary award from the Academy in 1992, less than a month before his death) and film restorer David Sheppard offer some fascinating insights into the subject of film preservation and the challenges of restoring Ray's films. By the time a restoration project was begun in the 1990s, few prints of Ray's early films remained. Not only had the negatives been used to make so many prints that they were essentially worn out, but the humid climate of Bengal had caused severe damage, causing a progressive process of chemical decomposition called "the vinegar syndrome" because of the strong smell of vinegar the damaged film gives off. After a set of negatives in good condition was discovered and sent to London, they were destroyed in a fire before any significant work could be done. The restorers were then forced to rely on assembling new prints from bits and pieces obtained from various sources, a process further complicated by the fact that only prints without subtitles could be used. Given these difficulties, it seems almost miraculous that the restoration project was able to be completed. I have seen the restored prints of the Apu trilogy sponsored by the Merchant and Ivory Foundation that resulted from the project and although not absolutely perfect, they are quite acceptable, especially compared to the much poorer quality prints of Ray's films from other sources.

My one reservation about The Song of the Little Road is that the interviews are illustrated not by live footage of the person being interviewed, but by stills apparently taken from the interview footage, giving the film a rather static quality at times. However, this is certainly offset by the excellence of the commentary and the power of the excerpts from Ray's films, which seem particularly well chosen to illustrate the point being made. All in all, The Song of the Little Road, which is distributed by NEHST Studios, is without question essential viewing for anyone interested in Satyajit Ray. Click here for more information.

---

Laurie Pederson of NEHST kindly sent me a review copy of The Song of the Little Road after reading my post on Ray's Aparajito and The World of Apu, the second and third films in the Apu trilogy.

Aparajito (1956) / The World of Apu (1959)

Aparajito
****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

The World of Apu
****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

Satyajit Ray's Pather Panchali (1955) is one of my favorite movies of all time. Based on the autobiographical first novel by the Bengali writer Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (Banerjee), it is the story of Apu, a young boy living in the impoverished countryside of Bengal in India in the early part of the twentieth century. Pather Panchali is one of the great movies about childhood, a film that at the same time graphically depicts a land and way of life wholly alien to most Americans and that also introduced the music of Ravi Shankar to the West. "Beautiful, sometimes funny, and full of love, it brought a new vision of India to the screen," wrote Pauline Kael about the film. I've waited for years to see the two sequels to Pather Panchali based on Bandopadhyay's second novel, Aparajito, films that pursue the story of Apu into his teenage years and young adulthood. I was recently able to see them at last, and the wait was certainly worth it, confirming my intuition based on seeing only a handful of his movies that Ray (1921-1992) was one of the greatest of all film directors.

Pather Panchali ends with the departure of Apu and his parents from their home in the countryside for a new life in the city. Aparajito picks up the story with their arrival in the holy city of Benares. Here Apu's father, a poet and priest, hopes to have greater opportunity to practice his profession, and spends much time on the banks of the Ganges teaching religion and reciting his poetry. Life is not much better for the family in Benares than it was in the country, though, as they continue to struggle against adversity and poverty. Apu's father has many competitors in the holy city, and his mother does not really seem at home in her new urban environment. The city does, however, prove to be an exciting place for young Apu, giving him many opportunities to observe people more colorful, and to visit places more exotic, than those of his former rural life.

The young Apu explores Benares

But not long after their arrival in Benares, Apu's father falls ill with a fever and dies, and Apu and his mother must return to the countryside. Here Apu develops a lifelong passion for education after he is allowed to attend the village school. At one point, he is presented with a tiny globe as a prize for his outstanding performance on his exams, a globe that he keeps with him always, a symbol of the craving for knowledge and experience that becomes the driving force in his life. An exceptional student, he is offered a scholarship to attend secondary school in Calcutta. The second half of the film details Apu's teenage years as a student in Calcutta, where he attends classes by day and works in a printing press at night to earn his living expenses.

The teenage Apu (with his globe) arrives in Calcutta to begin his studies

During this time, it is clear that Apu's mother is deeply affected by his absence and that Apu on his part experiences great conflict between his devotion to education and the concern he feels about leaving his mother. Trains become a recurrent reminder for both the boy and his mother of the hardships of their separation. Many times a train passes by in the background as his mother stands outside, and several scenes take place in trains as Apu travels between Calcutta and the country during his school holidays. For his mother the trains serve as both a hopeful image of Apu's infrequent visits and a melancholy portent of his inevitable departure, while for Apu they come to represent his divided existence, in the country as a dutiful son and in Calcutta as an independent, ambitious young man. Aparajito ends with two nearly simultaneous events that determine the direction of Apu's future—the death of his mother and his graduation from secondary school. He is now free to leave his former life completely behind and begin a new life as a permanent resident of Calcutta and student at the university there.

The World of Apu is a less diffuse film than Aparajito, most of it taking place in a relatively brief span of time. Apu is now a grown man, a university student. (Apu is brilliantly played by 24-year old Soumitra Chatterjee, in his first movie role. He would go on to appear in fourteen more of Ray's films.) Forced by his financial situation to quit school just before he graduates, Apu is a dreamer, a young man who habitually avoids responsibility and can't seem to focus on the mundane, practical side of life, like getting a job and paying his rent, preferring instead to work on his novel. When his best friend and university classmate Pulu gets in touch with him and takes him out for dinner, on the way home Apu breaks into an exuberant ode to freedom and spontaneity. Pulu tells him he acts like he has been drinking, and Apu is in a sense drunk—on the simple joy of being alive.

Pulu's friendship becomes instrumental to Apu's future when he invites Apu to come with him to the countryside where his wealthy family lives, for during this visit Apu meets his future bride, Pulu's cousin Aparna. The marriage is a sudden one, essentially an arranged marriage, and at first the newlyweds barely know each other. In time, though, as they develop a deep love for one another, Aparna becomes the catalyst for profound changes in Apu's casual and self-indulgent attitude to life.

The adult Apu and Aparna

Apu's life undergoes another radical change when Aparna dies giving birth to their son, Kajal. Overwhelmed by grief, Apu rejects his newborn son, leaving him with Aparna's family, and spends the next several years wandering India in a state of intense depression. He even gives up writing the novel he has been working on for so long and one day on the top of a mountain impulsively tosses its pages into the wind, and watches impassively as they flutter away, an evocative reminder of the way youthful dreams and ambitions can be so drastically altered by time and circumstance. Five years later Pulu locates Apu working in a coal mine in an isolated mountain community and persuades the reluctant Apu to return to Bengal with him and finally meet his son. The reunion is an uneasy one for both father and son, but when Apu sees how little love Kajal receives from Aparna's aged parents, he leaves, taking Kajal with him. Recognizing that his son's needs are more important than his own sense of loss, Apu at last grows beyond his despair and finds in his role as a father a new meaning to his life.

Apu and Kajal embark on a new life together

So many powerful themes are concentrated in the Apu trilogy that it's difficult to know where to begin a discussion of them. Perhaps a good place to start is with the universality of these films. Taken together, they cover nearly three decades in the life of one man, telling the story of one individual set in the context of a specific time—the early twentieth century—and a specific and quite distinctive culture. Yet it is a story whose essentials transcend the boundaries of place and time, for it is largely a story of change and growth, what psychologists call individuation, or the development of a person's unique and individual identity. It is the story of the transitions in Apu's life—from a rural agrarian way of life to a modern urban life in a commercial economy, from following the traditional family vocation in the priesthood to finding a new role in life as a scholar and writer, from innocence to knowledge, from childhood to adulthood and eventually parenthood, from the self-absorption of immaturity to the selflessness elicited by the transformative power of love.

Yet concurrent with the idea of the constant flux of life is the theme of its continuity. Water, that simple and archetypal symbol of life's flowing continuity, is an image that appears time and again in these films. One of the most memorable sequences in Pather Panchali occurs when the monsoon finally arrives and ends the drought, as torrents of rain drench the parched landscape. The holy River Ganges is a vivid image in Aparajito. In The World of Apu, Aparna's family lives near a large river, and the last scene in the film is of Apu leaving Aparna's family home with Kajal on his shoulders and a smile on his face, walking beside that river as he follows its current towards the sea.

Another important element in these films is the notion of the cyclical nature of life and the way opposing forces in life tend to balance each other, concepts found in many Eastern religions and philosophies. The films are punctuated by birth and death, departure and return, separation and reunion, alienation and reconciliation. In each of the three films death is a significant event, yet loss is always balanced by regeneration: The deaths of Apu's sister and his elderly aunt in Pather Panchali are balanced by the prospect of a new beginning for the family that concludes the film. Aparajito is framed by the deaths of Apu's father at the beginning and of his mother at the end, yet in this film Apu's appetite for knowledge is awakened and he begins the process of forging a new identity for himself. The World of Apu is dominated by the devastating loss of Aparna, yet it also includes the birth of Kajal, with whom Apu is reunited at the end of the movie as he begins yet another phase of his life. By the end of the cycle of films, life has come full circle: one small boy has grown to manhood, and the story continues with his own son, now about the same age as Apu in Pather Panchali.

Satyajit Ray—like John Ford, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, François Truffaut, and Jean Renoir—is often called a humanist filmmaker. It's a designation that seems wholly justified, for Ray shares with those other esteemed directors a set of traits that I would say are characteristic of that rather nebulous label: the universality of his themes, the emphasis on characters and how they relate to nature and the world around them, his fascination with the ways in which people in specific circumstances react to those circumstances and interact with one another, and his dispassionate acceptance of the fact that both the noblest and the most petty drives coexist in human nature. All of these traits are plainly displayed in the Apu trilogy, as glorious and moving a celebration of the complexities of human experience as can be found in all of cinema.

Charulata (1964)

****
Country: India
Director: Satyajit Ray

In colonial Calcutta in 1879 a young married woman named Charulata lives the sheltered, pampered life of the idle rich. She spends her days in an opulent house—a traditional two-story dwelling built around an open courtyard but furnished in the style of Victorian Britain—playing cards, doing embroidery, and reading romantic novels, her needs seen to by servants. Her husband, Bhupati, who is several years older than Charu, is completely occupied with publishing his political newspaper. Charu's boredom and loneliness and the distance between her and her husband are established in the first sequence of the film as she listens attentively to the street noises outside for signs that he is returning home. Each time she hears someone passing, she runs to the window, flicks open the shutters, and peers at the passerby through a pair of opera glasses. Finally Bhupati arrives home—and goes directly to his study with a book in his hand while Charu looks on in silence from down the corridor. Later that evening he tells her that a young cousin who has recently graduated from university, a relative so close that Bhupati calls him "Brother," is coming to stay and asks her, "You feel lonely, don't you, Charu?" "I've got used to it," she answers.

The lonely Charu finds the playful, high-spirited cousin, 23-year old Amal, a poet and musician and student of literature, a fascinating antidote to her sober, unimaginative husband. Basking in the attention Amal shows her—discussing poetry, music, and literature with her, singing to her, sitting with her in the garden while he writes poetry, encouraging her to take up writing—she soon develops a romantic passion for him, which she believes he secretly returns. When he reveals that Bhupati is paying him to "educate" her, she is crushed. Then when his poetry is accepted for publication, she is devastated by the prospect that he might be lured away from the household by literary ambition and in frustration takes up his suggestion that she write about events from her life. So good is her writing that Amal begins to see her in a new light, finding himself attracted to her.

Adapted by Ray from a novel by Rabindranath Tagore, Charulata shows Ray's decidedly literary approach to cinema, with a carefully engineered plot, characters of great complexity, and clearly delineated themes. All three main characters are memorably conceived and interpreted, but this is really Charu's story, a sort of pre-Women's Lib feminist tale of an unfulfilled young woman's initiation into consciousness. By the end of the film, Charu has experienced liberation of her emotions and her creative impulse and has reached a new understanding with her husband, each now more aware, and respectful, of the other's needs. Encircling this story is Ray's perennial fascination with the dialectic of opposing forces in life—politics and art, intellect and emotions, the outside world and the inner lives of individuals. At one point Amal turns philosophical: "Birth and death. Day and night. Joy and sadness. Unification and separation." Each of these things exists, he tells Charu, because of its opposite. That idea seems to sum up Ray's humanistic view of the way the oppositions in life, and the oppositions of human personalities, play against each other but in the end inevitably reach a state of equilibrium, each complementing and sustaining its opposite.

In Charulata Ray takes his style further into experimentation than one might expect from his earlier work. At one point, Charu comes into the room to find Amal sitting at the piano playing and singing a tender love song that begins, "I know you, I know you, O foreigner." Within a few moments the scene has become a dreamy musical interlude, the piano replaced with an offscreen orchestra, and Amal singing directly to Charu, ending the song with a spontaneous alteration of the opening line of the lyric: "I know you, I know you, O sister-in-law." Charu reacts to Amal's performance with the rapture of a woman being serenaded by her beloved. In this stylized sequence, a directorial flight of fancy in an otherwise realistic film, Ray seems to enter into Charu's mind, showing an embellished version of reality colored by her romantic longings.

Ray also experiments with photography and editing. The camera seems to move and track a great deal. Several times Ray discreetly zooms toward or away from an object. When Charu is sitting in a swing in the garden, the camera swings back and forth with her. He also uses the subjective camera at a couple of conspicuous points, one time when the characters are looking through a kaleidoscope and again during that love song when Amal is stepping towards Charu in rhythm to the song and we briefly see her from his point of view, the camera jarring at each step. And when Charu finally sits down to write her autobiographical story, superimposed over her face is a brief montage of scenes from her childhood, scenes that suggest a more rural and less privileged background than that of her husband.

Twenty years later Ray returned to the same themes in The Home and the World (1984), a movie with many similarities to Charulata and also adapted from a novel by Tagore. (Soumitra Chatterjee, who plays Amal in Charulata, would take the role of the neglectful older husband in the later film.) As much as I like The Home and the World, I have to admit that Charulata strikes me as a more passionate, adventurous, and emotionally involving film, one of the best I've ever seen by Ray, very close in quality and appeal to Pather Panchali, one of my favorite movies of all time. (One caveat: although the version I got from Netflix, released by Bollywood Films Ltd., has an adequate film transfer, there are many annoying shortcomings in the subtitles—the most amusing of which is calling the Liberal Party the Libel Party—that you have to be prepared to bear with.)

---

For more about the life and films of Satyajit Ray, see the website Satyajit Ray World.

No Regrets for Our Youth (1946)

***^½
Country: Japan
Director: Akira Kurosawa

Seeing this early film of Kurosawa recently was for me a revelation. I was immediately struck by how dissimilar it is to most of the later films I'm familiar with. Those later works are almost exclusively male-centered. The women in those movies not only are few in number, but also tend to have secondary roles and to lack the complexity of the male characters. Like his idol John Ford, the subjects that interested Kurosawa—honor, loyalty, betrayal and revenge, shrewdness of thought and strategy, physical prowess and the use of force to ensure that personal might and moral right prevail—are male preoccupations explored through problems faced and resolved by male characters. Yet according to David Thomson, this is not typical of classic Japanese cinema: "Despite the flourish and fame of Kurosawa, the core of Japanese cinema is to be found in family stories, wistful romances, and in attention paid to women as much as to men." What is so surprising about No Regrets for Our Youth is how closely it corresponds to Thomson's description of mainstream Japanese cinema, unlike the bulk of Kurosawa's work.

Like many of the films coming out of China in the last twenty years, No Regrets not only places its story in the context of recent historical events, but actually links its plot to those events, in itself unusual in a Kurosawa movie. The main character is a young woman, Yukie (Sestuko Hara), the daughter of a professor of law at Kyoto University when the movie opens in 1933. Professors and students at the university are embroiled in agitation against the suppression of academic freedom by the minister of education, specifically the suppression of their protests against the war-mongering of the government in the run-up to the invasion of Manchuria—a situation strongly reminiscent of the controversial protest movements at universities in this country in the 1960s during the Vietnam War, such as the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. Yukie is torn between two suitors, Itokawa and Noge. Both of these young men begin as student rebels but later follow different paths. Noge drops out of school just before graduating, spends five years in jail because of his political dissent, and after his release becomes an anti-war writer, publisher, and activist. In contrast, Itokawa abandons his rebellion, remains in school, and after graduation becomes a government prosecutor and member of the establishment.

Yukie, raised in a very Westernized household, rejects the traditional, subservient role of Japanese women and spends her life searching for meaning. In a house filled with books and Western furniture, she wears Western clothing, eats with a knife and fork, and plays Russian piano music, expressing her inner turmoil by intense sessions at the piano playing "The Great Gate of Kiev" from Moussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. At one point she shocks the other young women in her flower arranging class by telling them she hates the arrangement of hers they are admiring because she despises having to follow the rigid rules they are taught, preferring to follow her own inspiration. She then impulsively destroys her arrangement by tearing it from its vase, ripping the flowers off their stalks, and dropping three flowers into a large bowl of water, where they float in beautiful isolation (an unconscious representation of Itokawa, Noge, and herself adrift?) in an image that would not seem out of place in a film by Ozu.

This is just the beginning of Yukie's journey of self-discovery. She rejects Itokawa's marriage proposal, leaves home and supports herself working at a series of menial secretarial jobs in Tokyo, reconnects with Noge, marries him, sees him arrested as a traitor literally on the eve of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is herself interrogated as a subversive (the arrogant interrogator is played by Takashi Shimura, who worked in at least twenty of Kurosawa's films, becoming one of his main male actors, second only to Toshiro Mifune, and in Kurosawa's 1952 masterpiece Ikiru gave one of the great screen performances of all time), jailed, widowed, estranged from her family, and finally ends up spending the duration of World War II as a permanent uninvited guest of Noge's resentful peasant mother and father.

This is certainly the closest thing Kurosawa ever made to a "women's picture," and the amazing thing is how well he does it. No Regrets was only his sixth movie as director, yet already he seems in full command of both the Western techniques of cinematic storytelling and the brilliant way he had of pursuing theme through character. No Regrets may be about a young woman, but its sensibility is in no way feminine. By concentrating on Yukie's quest for meaning in her life—even the romantic complications of her life are an offshoot of this—Kurosawa avoids the sentimentality that traditionally devalues the genre, elevating the film to a sort of female bildungsroman—the chronicles of the ethical, emotional, and spiritual development of a young woman who defies her culture's veneration of conformity over self-expression.

The picture is beautifully framed by two scenes: an idyllic picnic at the beginning of the movie and a scene near the end where Yukie revisits the site of the picnic and sees a new generation of students doing the same things she and her friends did all those years ago, a poignant reminder of how much her life has changed and how much she has grown in the intervening years. Like Shimura's dying civil servant in Ikiru, Yukie ultimately comes to the realization that the key to finding meaning in her life is to free herself from her own self-concern.

Kurosawa is aided immensely by the casting of Setsuko Hara as Yukie. The intelligence and spirit she brings to the role—what Thomson calls "her outward modesty and inner strength"—make the character come alive. She was only in her mid-twenties when the film was made, yet she was already an expert movie actress. (She had been acting in films for ten years.) The expressiveness of her voice, the subtlety of her facial expressions and body language, the independence of thought and strength of character she projects are tremendously affecting, reminiscent of the controlled intensity of the young Katharine Hepburn but without the exaggerated mannerisms. The way she holds her head perfectly still, looking slightly down and straight ahead as another character speaks to her, and then at just the exactly judged moment lifts her head, turns it, and gazes wistfully at the speaker with those soulful eyes is just hypnotic. She carries the entire movie, and her amazing work here prefigures the great performances for Ozu in Late Spring, Tokyo Story, and Late Autumn.

In No Regrets for Our Youth, as in only a few of his films like the great Ikiru, Kurosawa uncharacteristically downplays his trademark visual grandeur and stylization to concentrate instead on the inner life of a character. The result is a sensitivity and depth of feeling not typically associated with Kurosawa.

Spring in a Small Town (1948)

****
Country: China
Director: Mu Fei

I had never heard of this movie before I spotted it in the library recently. Reading on the DVD case that it was chosen the best Chinese film of all time by the Hong Kong Film Critics Society in 2002, I just had to watch it. I haven't seen many films from Mainland China, and those I have seen were all made in the last twenty years or so. But I must say that this one is an unpretentious gem which deserves its status as a classic.

Spring in a Small Town—the last of only six movies directed by Mu Fei, who died in Hong Kong in 1951—seems on its surface quite simple. There are only five characters in the movie and just a handful of locations, and the plot can be summed up in a few sentences. In China just after the end of WW II a man weakened by illness (it is described at various times as tuberculosis, a heart condition, and depression), the son of a family that has lost its wealth, lives in the half-ruined family home with his unhappy wife, his 15-year old sister, and an elderly family servant. Into this placid existence comes a visitor whose presence brings the somber household to life but at the same time causes a great deal of emotional tension. The visitor, a medical doctor, is the best friend of the husband but also happens to have been the first love of the wife.

The action in the film is largely psychological and interior, and much more is suggested than openly expressed. This is a movie where an apparently calm surface conceals turmoil and unsuspected depths just underneath, where the characters' emotions are reined in and rarely revealed to one another, where the most commonplace things—unemphatic gestures, brief glances, ordinary conversations—can hold great meaning. Yet these small things evoke strong emotional responses in the viewer—no easy thing to accomplish in such a circumscribed narrative context.

Mu Fei's subdued direction shows great confidence in the power of location, situation, and acting rather than directorial flourishes to put across evocative emotions, yet in no way does the movie seem impersonal. This unobtrusive style applied to an uncomplicated story resembles in spirit the postwar humanist realism of movies like Forbidden Games, Umberto D, and Pather Panchali. The few outdoor locations are particularly well chosen. The ruined city walls where the movie opens and where characters often meet are a reminder of the isolation of these people and of the precariousness of their existence amidst encroaching decay. The river where, in an especially lovely sequence, the principal characters spend a day out boating suggests liberation from the tedium and limitation of their daily lives. In interior shots the director shows great attention to architectural pattern and detail and also great care with the atmospheric use of lighting, especially in scenes that take place at night.

Equally responsible for the film's greatness are the restrained, naturalistic performances of the three main actors, each of whom immediately establishes a dominant mood for his or her character that never wavers. As the visitor, Wei Li is a bundle of repressed conflict between the loyalty and sympathy he feels for his sick friend and the powerful emotions caused by unexpectedly encountering his first love again. Wei Wei, superb as the wife, is also torn between conflicting feelings—on the one hand resignation to the barrenness of her present life with her husband, on the other the longing for emotional fulfillment awakened by the reappearance of a more vital man from her past. Perhaps most impressive of all is Yu Shi as the sickly husband, a non-reactive man fading away from his own passivity, but acutely aware of his responsibility for his wife's disappointment and of the hopelessness of their situation. His facial expressions, his posture and bearing, his lethargic movements all deftly portray a man defeated and profoundly sad. In one poignant scene he sneaks into his wife's empty bedroom, walks to her bed, gingerly caresses her pillow for an instant, then, overcome with emotion, flees.

One final comment: The visual transfer of this movie is only fair; you have to imagine how splendid it would look in a pristine, restored state. Even so, Spring in a Small Town is so affecting and so subtly nuanced that I really can't recommend it more highly.

---

For another view of Spring in a Small Town read Allan Fish's excellent review at Wonders in the Dark.