Filed under: Reviews | Tags: 1960, mikio naruse, when a woman ascends the stairs
Director: Mikio Naruse
Shot in crisp black-and-white CinemaScope and accompanied with a jazz score, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs should come as a surprise to anyone who has seen any of Mikio Naruse’s earlier, more staid features. Although Keiko, the protagonist played by Naruse’s muse, Hideko Takamine, is hard-working, her immediate setting sets her drastically apart from Repast‘s’ Michiyo, whose drab, middle-class life was characterized by a lack of communication. The two women, though, are both at the mercy of an intensely patriarchal society, quite literally in the latter picture in which Keiko’s disappointing encounters with three potential suitors leads her to a dead end. Western audiences will be forgiven if they assume that Keiko is a prostitute in the early-goings, but she is far from it – though sleeping with customers is part of the job for some of her co-workers, as a hostess she specializes in flattery and companionship, scoffing at the idea of taking the relationships any further. While Naruse maintains her integrity in that respect, however, the film’s most unfortunate scene involves her manager, a romantic interest played by Tatsuya Nakadai, brutally chastising her for sleeping with someone else – watching such an already disheartened woman endure such vitriol is unpleasant both intellectually and morally, as one questions whether or not the picture is excessively sadomasochistic in its treatment of her. Regardless, Takamine is magnificent as the protagonist, and the way that Naruse details the bar and its inhabitants is most satisfying, establishing an unforgettable setting that one can imagine still bustles with life all of these years later.
Director: Mikio Naruse
A single-mother relates a devastating epiphany to Setsuko Hara’s Michiyo: “A woman on her own can’t achieve much.” Director Mikio Naruse, whose work is often discussed in terms of his frequent feminist themes, examines the discontentment of a wife in a partnership that has long since proven satisfying in Repast. The situation in the household doesn’t seem particularly volatile, rather ridden into the ground by the predictability of routine (Naruse’s frequent use of the claustrophobic frame-within-a-frame perhaps best accentuates the lack of flexibility in their day-to-day living). While one might expect Ken Uehara – as Hatsunosuke, the husband – to be vilified, he is taken seriously if not apologetically. In a marriage without any affection, he chooses to seek romantic fulfillment in his flirtations with his young niece in a surprisingly bold subplot. Naruse, like Ozu, is fascinated with the minutia of domestic living, and the drama plays out so understated that one might make the mistake of thinking that nothing has happened at all. If not wholly successfully, partially due to a cop-out ending that shares similarities with many of the Hollywood pictures compromised by the Production Code, Repast is a quietly moving drama that affords its topic the complexity and nuance it deserves.
For Reel 