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(Continued from page 2)
Seeing the film for the fourth time, I was struck by how prominently the characters’ hands convey their shifting relationships, a nice use by the filmmakers of visual means to advance the drama in this otherwise very dialogue-driven film. When Ihara and Nobuko dine in the Ginza after the concert they attend together, and she pours his beer for him, Ihara, with typical aggressiveness, seizes her hand in a brazen attempt to seduce her – but she’s having none of it. While he holds her hand in his and their eyes lock, she, unnoticed by him, lifts his still-lit cigarette from the ashtray and crushes it out on his hand, much to his surprise. (“I’m to be feared,” she says, smiling.)
In a later scene, when Ihara accompanies Tamiko as far as Yokohama while on her trip to Kyoto, and is about to disembark, he casually shakes her hand: this time, for once, out of politeness and with no ulterior intent. But Tamiko, lost in her desire for him, refuses to let go of his hand, and he realizes that he has the young woman in his power. (They sleep together for the first time that day.)
During Tamiko’s return trip to Tokyo from Kyoto, she meets by chance her other suitor, Komatsu. They chat amiably for awhile until she falls asleep on the seat beside him. But when her hand innocently falls onto his lap, he carefully removes it – a foreshadowing of his later final rejection of her.
Nobuko emerges by default as the only sympathetic character in the narrative. The blogger for the Japanonfilm website has pointed out that a recurring theme in Japanese movies of the classic era (and later) is that “no good deed goes unpunished,” and that’s certainly true of poor Nobuko, who merely wants to do her duty as a stepmother to adult children that she can’t bring herself to love, and who absolutely loathe her.
Uchida’s decision to cast Tsukioka Yumeji in this role is curious: the character is repeatedly referred to as being forty years old, while Tsukioka was at that time only in her early thirties, and very youthful-looking at that. Nevertheless, the actress admirably captures the woman’s dignity, warmth, compassion and paradoxical toughness. When, in the scene described above, she crushes out the lit cigarette in Ihara’s hand, the gesture is meant to discourage her own desire as much as his.
Nobuko, attracted despite herself to Ihara, had at first encouraged Tamiko to marry the doctor because of his wealth and social position. However, she later tries, for the young woman’s own good, to discourage her involvement with him, an altruistic act that the shallow and selfish Tamiko interprets as the scheming of a ruthless rival.
Nobuko in the kitchen receives from Tamiko a letter addressed to her from Ihara, and Tamiko rudely demands that she open it and read it in front of her. The older woman unexpectedly tears the letter up unread, and burns the pieces in the flame of the kitchen stove. (The audience never does find out what was in the letter.) Nobuko is being cruel to be kind, but the narcissistic Tamiko, obsessed with Ihara, perceives only the cruelty, and this quarrel precipitates the final break between stepmother and stepdaughter.
Junjirō’s contempt for his stepmother, by contrast, is sly and subtle, couched in the language of “democratization.” When Nobuko asks Junjirō if he agrees with his sister that she, Nobuko, has become an “unsettling presence” in the siblings’ lives, he hypocritically replies that Nobuko can do as she pleases and that “we should respect each others’ freedoms and rights.” (He says this even as he schemes to deprive Nobuko of the land money to which she’s entitled.)
He would be a merely villainous rather than a tragic character if not for his destructive passion for his errant wife Keiko. Her surprising return to the household in the film’s final act seems to me poorly motivated and unbalances the film’s narrative arc. Yet Junjirō’s painful obsession with her, which leads him to risk death by crawling out of his sickbed to be with her, is strangely moving, and stands in fascinating contrast to Ihara’s contempt for and indifference to his own (unseen) ex-wife.
It’s very surprising that Uchida and Yagi manage to evoke any sympathy at all for Tamiko, who’s cold, selfish and immature, and a thief to boot, as she brazenly and illegally withholds Nobuko’s part of their inheritance. Even her sincere affection and care for her sick brother is compromised when, after learning from him that he’s wasted the family fortune, including Nobuko’s share of it, through bad stock investments, she becomes so angry that she leaves him at the mercy of his illness – in effect killing him. Her grief at his subsequent death is thus compounded by guilt.
But the viewer can’t ultimately find satisfaction in Tamiko’s self-destruction, because she has lost, or is about to lose, literally everything: family, lover, wealth, even her own house, and one wonders what will become of her. (On the other hand, she still has her rich uncle and that chalet of his, so she’s not totally without options.) The film is ultimately a study of extreme perversity: Tamiko and Junjirō scorn the people who try to help them, like Nobuko, and vainly pursue people who despise and hurt them, like Ihara and Keiko.
The visual look of the film is most unusual, perhaps unique for Uchida. The cinematography and the décor of this very dark film have the muted, somber quality of Naruse Mikio in his most fertile period, particularly of his classic Floating Clouds (Ukigumo), also released in 1955.
The music by Akutagawa Yasushi is also extremely unusual in being a series of baroque melodies, presumably composed for the film, played on the harpsichord, long before the use of harpsichord music for sinister or comic effect became a cliché of films and TV in the 1960s (e.g., The Prisoner, The Addams Family).1 And many critics have commented upon Uchida’s use of offscreen sounds – traffic, construction noises, fighter jets – to evoke a bustling modern world beyond the hothouse environment in which the drama plays out.
On the negative side, one of Uchida’s most admirable qualities as a moviemaker – his narrative concision – seemed to have temporarily deserted him. Quite a few short scenes have no dramatic point. Although my synopsis above may appear extremely detailed, about half a dozen scenes have been entirely omitted from it, or else condensed into a sentence or two. If those needless sequences had been eliminated, and the rest tightened up in the editing, the released film could easily have been about fifteen minutes shorter, which would have greatly improved it. As it is, the film’s slightly more than two-hour running time feels much longer than it is.
And so, in 1955, Uchida Tomu released three vastly different films – A Bloody Spear at Mount Fuji, Twilight Saloon and this one – for three different studios. Although they were not equally successful artistically, each revealed different facets of his rich and complex talent. Despite being a man of late middle age in very poor health, the filmmaker, as if to compensate for his dozen years away from the director’s chair, had set himself the grueling challenge of completing three very ambitious films back-to-back, and had succeeded.
As far as is known to me, Uchida’s comeback was the most impressive of any director in the whole history of Japanese Cinema. The only comparable career resurrection is that of Kurosawa Akira, who, after a decade of heartbreaking failure and a well-publicized suicide attempt, released, in 1975, the Oscar-winning Dersu Uzala – ironically, a Soviet production in the Russian language. But Kurosawa, of course, had the enormous advantage of a huge international audience for his work, which Uchida didn’t have… and still doesn’t.
Added: Late September 2024.
I now realize that it is sometimes a more meaningful and satisfying experience to watch an excellent print of a non-English-language film without subtitles – assuming, that is, that one has obtained a detailed plot synopsis – than to watch a very poor quality film with adequate subtitles. Though my print of The Horse Boy (Abarenbō kaidō (1957), which I’ve recently reviewed) contained no English titles, a Japanese translator friend was able to provide me with details of the plot that I might not have picked up on otherwise, and the rest of the narrative I could glean from the visuals, which, though the film was shot in black-and-white, were quite legible, even in night scenes. But for this film, by contrast, I had been using a print of such poor quality that significant details were obscured even in scenes taking place in midday, and the visuals were incredibly muddy during interior and night scenes. Thus, with the new, much-improved print I now possess, I feel almost as if I’m seeing the film for the first time. In fact, I was seriously tempted to upgrade my IMDb score for this movie from an 8 to a 9, though I ultimately didn’t do so.
A good example of what I’m talking about is the scene in which Nobuko entertains Dr. Ihara at her home in Tamiko’s absence, while the latter’s invalid brother Junjirō observes the interaction from his bed on the floor. After explaining to Junjirō why he’s not attracted to Tamiko, Dr. Ihara, without skipping a beat, declares his attraction to Tamiko’s stepmother, Nobuko, while the astonished woman herself looks on.
In the faded print I previously used, it’s not possible to fully determine the characters’ reactions in this scene, particularly as it takes place within an interior space at night. But in the new print, the characters’ facial expressions are completely visible, so that the viewer can clearly see that the bemused Junjirō is enjoying both Ihara’s brazen aggressiveness and Nobuko’s discomfiture. Later, he will inform Tamiko of Ihara’s visit and describe the doctor’s strange behavior, inflaming her jealousy by maintaining falsely that Nobuko actually enjoyed Ihara’s attentions (though it’s possible he believes, or has made himself believe, that this is true).
The new print also allows us to fully appreciate for the first time Kimura Takeo’s excellent art direction, particularly for the scenes that take place in the Shiga family’s home. That family, as I’ve already mentioned, is poised awkwardly between two worlds: that of the wealth and privilege that the now-adult siblings had once enjoyed as children during the prewar era, and that of the chaotic modern era of jets and construction sites, which is not so much witnessed by them as experienced as an aural invasion of alien sounds. (In one shot, Tamiko covers her ears to drown out the noise of the jets.) Kimura suggests the old, prewar world in the many unobtrusive details he includes within the set of the Shiga household, suggesting the quiet elegance of a vanished quasi-aristocracy (e.g., there are books everywhere), contrasted dramatically with the messy modernity that Komatsu encounters during his wanderings over the length and breadth of Japan.
Not that those wanderings don’t themselves sometimes yield moments of beauty. There is a wonderfully-composed shot (by cinematographer Mine Shigeyoshi), which I’d completely forgotten or never really noticed from previous viewings, of Komatsu watching the sea while seated on an outcropping of rocks. That shot, which lasts just a few seconds, perfectly epitomizes Komatsu’s peaceful, detached approach to life, but otherwise fulfills no narrative function. It’s rather like the “pillow shots” in Ozu’s films, only with a much more Romantic-looking vista than anything Ozu himself would have used.
Finally, there are the little visual details revealing the inner lives of the characters that add so much to the film. For example, when she goes to the hotel room in Yokohama with Ihara, at which she loses her virginity, Tamiko gazes with fascination into a set of facing mirrors at her own reflection, as if wondering if she has changed. Several days later, at home, she unwraps a music box – perhaps a present Ihara gave her, or maybe something she bought for herself – and when she opens the toy, there are two miniature doors that open to reveal miniature facing mirrors. The kawai (cute) object reminds the viewer of the scene of her tryst with Ihara, as well as symbolizing her narcissistic and immature personality.
Post-postscript: I’m indebted to IUTAS member Akasaka Daisuke for pointing out, in his essay on Uchida’s historical films on this website, that A Hole of My Own Making was the favorite Uchida film of Oshima Nagisa, the director of Boy (Shonen, 1969), The Ceremony (Gishiki, 1971), and In the Realm of the Senses (Ai no koriida, 1976), among many other notable movies. This makes sense, as Oshima was fascinated by eroticized relationships within insular families. However, it’s ironic that the younger filmmaker would choose as his most beloved Uchida film perhaps the older director’s least typical work – to the extent that Uchida can even be said to have had a “typical” film at all.
Uchida’s attempt at a Naruse-like woman’s melodrama is fascinating, but the narrative is slow-moving, somewhat unfocused and not completely plausible, though the film contains several excellent performances, particularly by Tsukioka Yumeji and Mikuni Rentarō.
Midnight Eye [Jasper Sharp]
Senses of Cinema [Alexander Jacoby]
Martin Dowsing’s review (Obscure Japanese Film #134)
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Thanks for your kind comments. Creating a blog is just a matter of learning by doing. I had to learn everything from scratch. It’s mainly a matter of figuring out what you want on your blog and how to organize it. I’m on free WordPress, but hosted by a paid service. This is working out so far, though it’s become expensive recently.