Product Description
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Mikio Naruse (Floating Clouds, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs)
was one of the most popular directors in Japan, a crafter of
exquisite melodramas, mostly about women confined by their social
and domestic circumstances. Though often compared with Yasujiro
Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi for his style and of
characters, Naruse was a unique artist, making heartrending,
brilliantly photographed and edited films about the impossible
pursuit of happiness. From the outset of his career, with his
silent films of the early thirties, Naruse zeroed in on the lives
of the kinds of people—geisha, housewives, waitresses—who would
continue to fascinate him for the next three decades. Though he
made two dozen silent films, only five remain in existence; these
works—poignant, dazzlingly made dramas all—are collected here,
newly restored and on DVD for the first time, and featuring
optional new scores by noted musicians Robin Holcomb and Wayne
Horvitz.
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This outwardly unremarkable three-disc set from the Criterion
Collection's pared-down offshoot Eclipse label is an intriguing
collection of the earliest surviving work of Japanese director
Mikio Naruse. Its appeal should hardly be limited to those with a
scholarly interest in the nascent efforts of a master whose work
has largely been unrecognized by Western audiences. It also makes
for a fascinating glimpse into how the language of cinema
developed in tandem with some of the more ambitious works being
produced in the United States, Germany, and the Soviet Union as
filmmakers were gaining greater understanding of the emotional,
artistic, and intellectual impact this new form could have as a
popular entertainment medium. Naruse is probably fourth in line
behind Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu in the
Japanese directors' hall of fame, but that's probably a distant
fourth, and his name may not be known at all to many. He was a
stolid, workmanlike purveyor of films about ordinary people often
living bleak lives in contemporary times, producing about 90
films over a career that spanned from 1930 to 1967 (he died in
1969). Most of those films are lost, and only one has been
readily available to region 1 viewers, his 1960 masterpiece When
a Woman Ascends the Stairs (on Criterion DVD). The five silent
films in this set were made between 1931 and 1934, and they show
a rapid development of style and form, and favored content that
leaned heavily on melodrama, but were easily accessible to
audiences of their time and remain striking for their lasting
historical impact.
The most lighthearted in the set is Flunky, Work Hard (1931),
Naruse's earliest surviving work, which follows a poor, bumbling,
and somewhat infantile insurance salesman as he tries to woo a
new client, keep his disgruntled wife happy, and maintain a
relationship with his troublesome young son. This truncated,
28-minute romp includes lots of genuine comic bits that recall
early Hollywood two-reelers before it lapses into the kind of
tortuous family drama that marks all the films in the set. It's
also a great starting point for the affecting anthropological
portrait all the films provide in capturing everyday life in
suburban Tokyo in the early '30s. Naruse often took his camera on
location into the narrow alleys, fields, and bustling streets
inhabited by his characters, and it's as captivating to see the
reality of ordinary backgrounds in Japan during that time as it
is to see the open spaces of small-town Los Angeles in
concurrently made films from early Hollywood.
The rest of the films in the set conform more closely to themes
that Naruse would develop for most of the rest of his career,
following the sa and struggles of primarily female
protagonists who undergo hardships and heartbreaks with very few
happy endings. No Blood Relation (1932), Apart from You (1933),
and Every-Night Dreams (1933) are fairly bald examples of
melodrama, but show enough freshness of technique to explain
Naruse's popularity as an accomplished storyteller. Aging
geishas, struggling mothers and mothers-in-law, children who are
conflicted or caught in the middle, husbands or suitors who are
either absent or angry, and the pull of tradition versus the
somewhat tawdry lure of modernity are recurring themes in these
short features that also rely heavily on expressionistic or
experimental techniques to often startling effect. Some of these
techniques are deliberately meant to draw attention to themselves
and are often overused. A favorite Naruse device of repeated fast
tracking s on characters' faces to emphasize emotional
conflict becomes unintentionally humorous after a while. Another
common thematic element that turns excessively comic is having a
character be hit by a car (or train). It's a device Naruse uses
to precipitate bedside drama or resolution of some sort, but
which comes off as facile in nearly every context. (Rather than
being med or mangled, the victims simply fall ill and are
confined to bed for such time as is convenient to the needs of
the script.) Street Without End (1934) is the only full
feature-length film in the set, and it roundly es out the
themes Naruse explores more daintily in the other offerings. A
waitress in a Ginza restaurant struggles with suitors and a
seemingly dead-end existence, ultimately failing at marriage and
with finding a way out of her bleak, existential life issues.
Though still mired in the trappings of melodrama, it shows
genuine stylistic assurance and the promise of a world-class
filmmaker who has much better control of craft and the subtlety
of film as both art and entertainment. All the films in this
beguiling collection include spare, unobtrusive scores (optional)
composed and performed by Robin Holcomb and Wayne Horvitz that
add a haunting, muted background nicely suited to the action.
--Ted Fry