- A Mother’s Love, Hiroshi Shimizu (drama)
- Wedding Ring, Keisuke Kinoshita (melodrama)
- The Munekata Sisters, Yasujirō Ozu (drama)
- Rashomon, Akira Kurosawa (drama, jidaigeki)
A Mother’s Love
(Bojō)
Direction: Hiroshi Shimizu
Screenplay: Hiroshi Shimizu, Matsuo Kishi
Studio: Shintoho
Genre: drama
Cast: Nijiko Kiyokawa, Musei Tokugawa, Yataro Kurokawa, Yoshiko Tsubouchi, Reiko Miyagawa, Tamae Kiyokawa, Kumeko Urabe, Chōko Iida, Isuzu Yamada
A woman working in a bar is unable to support her three children, each from a different relationship. She decides to give them to relatives and friends.
Commentary: Hiroshi Shimizu is known as a director who examines social issues, particularly those involving children and young people, and A Mother’s Love is no exception. The production is essentially a road film, composed of a series of sequences in which the titular mother attempts to entrust her children to the care of extended family, her former schoolteacher, and her old nanny. The protagonist thus symbolically retraces her own childhood dreams, desires, and fears, gradually rediscovering her conscience and coming to understand how her choices affect her children.
Although she makes decisions that bear the clear marks of selfishness, the mother is never portrayed by Shimizu in a negative light; instead, the director places the blame for her choices on the poverty pervading the country. Her mercenary approach to life contrasts with the sight of the families encountered at various points in the film, patiently enduring suffering and sacrificing themselves for their loved ones. Without stating it outright, the director largely blames the war for this sorry state of affairs. In the world presented in A Mother’s Love, mothers have been left without husbands, killed in the conflict, and in a patriarchal society have no means of finding work that pays enough to support a family of several people.
The fact that the protagonist has children from different relationships also constitutes a challenge to Japanese society, which regarded women who had been with more than one man as immoral and dissolute. The subject remained a taboo at the time; Shimizu, however, presents his heroine in exactly the same light as the other single mothers in the film, taking a stand against the criticism and demonization of women who had married more than once.
7/10
Wedding Ring
(Konyaku yubiwa)
Direction and screenplay: Keisuke Kinoshita
Studio: Shochiku
Genre: melodrama
Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Toshirō Mifune, Jūkichi Uno, Kenji Susukida, Nobuko Otowa, Mitsuko Yoshikawa, Junji Masuda
The owner of a jewellery shop falls in love with the doctor treating her ailing husband.
Commentary: Keisuke Kinoshita is among those directors who very frequently resorted to excessive sentimentality in their dramas when depicting the romantic tribulations of their characters. Wedding Ring belongs to precisely this group of productions — ones that lead the way in melodramatic and overly emotional storytelling. The story itself is also far too predictable. The film is a classic variation on the theme of forbidden love, in which the protagonists wage a battle for their feelings that is doomed from the outset. This means that the excellent Kinuyo Tanaka spends most of the film with tears in her eyes or weeping outright, before ultimately making the morally safe and correct decision. Toshirō Mifune portrays a young man similarly overwrought with emotion. Continuing the motif of all-pervasive sentimentality, he too will find himself shedding tears over his unfulfilled love.
6/10
The Munekata Sisters
(Munekata shimai)
Direction: Yasujirō Ozu
Screenplay: Yasujirō Ozu, Kōgo Noda, Jiro Osaragi
Studio: Shintoho
Genre: drama
Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Hideko Takamine, Ken Uehara, Sanae Takasugi, Chishū Ryū, Sō Yamamura, Yūji Hori, Reikichi Kawamura
#1 at the Japanese box office
#7 on the Kinema Junpo list
Setsuko is the unhappy wife of the heavy-drinking Mimura. Her true love is Hiroshi, who has just returned from France. Setsuko’s sister Mariko tries to bring them together, even though she herself is in love with him.
Commentary: Unusually for him, Ozu made The Munekata Sisters at the Shintoho studio, which offered him very favourable financial terms but in return imposed its own choice of subject matter and cast. The film therefore features both actors not strongly associated with Ozu (such as Ken Uehara) and those familiar from many of his productions, such as Chishū Ryū. The one thing that did not suit Ozu at all, however, was making a film based on a book. Although — by his own account — working on The Munekata Sisters was a pleasant experience, he strongly preferred writing his own screenplays and tailoring them to his actors rather than fitting actors to already existing characters; in this context it is unsurprising that this is the only literary adaptation he ever directed. The decision by Shintoho’s management to adapt Jirō Osaragi’s serialized novel was certainly a commercial one, as the writer was very popular at the time.
The production is a family drama that serves as a pretext for commenting on the changes taking place in post-war Japan, primarily those concerning the country’s modernization and generational differences. The titular sisters are Setsuko and Mariko. The first — always in a traditional kimono — represents the older generation and its traditional, enduring values; the second — dressed in Western-style clothing — is a young woman striving to be modern, who regards traditional patterns of behaviour as constraining and as obstacles to happiness. The depiction of contrasting worldviews through the device of two sisters was rightly criticized at the time of release for its lack of subtlety and schematic approach to the issues it raised. This trope — the collision of two women, most often sisters, one symbolizing tradition and the other modernity — had been a popular and widespread motif in Japanese literature and cinema since the 1920s. In The Munekata Sisters this conflict is not only simplified but also largely one-sided, ultimately reduced to a simple expression of longing for the past and an absence of any real attempt to understand the present or modernity.
Although Ozu — at least in The Munekata Sisters — is decidedly closer in sympathy to classical values, tested by many generations and intended to provide a moral guide to conduct, he is not entirely blind to the shortcomings of traditional thinking. Women’s faithful adherence to their traditional social role — embodied here by Setsuko — results in suffering and difficulty in everyday life. In this context, a more liberated view of relationships and of women’s position would, it seems, genuinely allow for the discovery of happiness. In the end neither sister changes her mind, of course, but through Mariko’s inability to fully defend her own position — her views being fairly sharply criticized or held up to ridicule — and through the choice of settings (one of the key scenes takes place at the Yakushiji temple, associated with the god of healing), the viewer is left in little doubt as to which side the film is on. Even so, there is also an attempt to reconcile both viewpoints and to refrain from an outright condemnation of modernity. The sisters’ father, Tadachika Munekata, gives voice to this when he says that both women have their own convictions and that neither is superior to the other. It might therefore seem that a gradual acceptance of the changes taking place in Japan is underway here — one tinged with sentiment and a strong nostalgia for times gone by, but not amounting to a desire to halt progress, provided that progress can genuinely improve living conditions.
Although the film is generally regarded as one of Ozu’s lesser works, it is a very enjoyable blend of drama and comedic elements, which help the viewer swallow the narrative naivety and coincidences — the greatest of which allows everyone to look to the future with hope. It is also worth noting that in terms of its story this is a rather unusual production for Ozu, as he did not typically present such stark tradition-versus-modernity dichotomies. This also means that The Munekata Sisters bears certain narrative similarities to the films of Kenji Mizoguchi, including Portrait of Madame Yuki, made in the same year.
7/10
Rashomon
(Rashōmon)
Direction: Akira Kurosawa
Screenplay: Akira Kurosawa, Shinobu Hashimoto
Studio: Daiei
Genre: drama, jidaigeki
Cast: Toshirō Mifune, Machiko Kyō, Takashi Shimura, Masayuki Mori, Minoru Chiaki
#5 on the Kinema Junpo list
Four people recall contradictory versions of a story involving murder and rape.
Commentary: Rashomon remains to this day one of the most important films not only in Japanese but in world cinema. It is a production that restored Japan to the world of film art and symbolically launched the so-called “golden age of Japanese cinema,” which is why it continues to be one of the most celebrated films in the history of that country’s filmmaking. The film was awarded, among other honours, the Golden Lion and the prize of the Italian critics at the Venice Film Festival, was nominated for the BAFTA Award for Best Film, received an Academy Award nomination, and in 1952 was given an Honorary Oscar as the best foreign film released in the United States in 1951. Rashomon‘s critical success translated into a surge of international interest in Japanese cinema, enabling such directors as Kenji Mizoguchi, Masaki Kobayashi, Keisuke Kinoshita, and Kaneto Shindō to triumph at international festivals.
Rashomon was made at the Daiei studio, during the period when Kurosawa — between 1949 and 1951 — temporarily left Toho, where he had made the majority of his productions. Daiei’s management was not initially willing to finance the director’s new project, fearing that his idea was too unconventional and that the film would struggle to find an audience. The studio’s concerns proved unfounded, and Rashomon turned out to be one of Daiei’s better-performing films of 1950. Nevertheless, when the film was selected — on the recommendation of Giuliana Stramigioli, an Italian foreign-language teacher — to compete at the Venice Film Festival, both Daiei and the Japanese government made efforts to have the screening cancelled. Arguing that it was not sufficiently representative of Japanese cinema, they attempted to send a film directed by Yasujirō Ozu in its place. Japanese cinema thus made its entry onto the international festival circuit not through a work promoted as a national flagship, but through one whose selection had initially met with resistance at home.
The screenplay of Rashomon was based on two short stories by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa and is set during a period of social crisis in the eleventh century, chosen as the ideal backdrop for portraying extremes of human behaviour. The film’s main narrative is presented through flashbacks depicting contradictory accounts recalled by a woodcutter, a priest, and a criminal, as they tell the story of the bandit Tajomaru, who allegedly raped a woman he encountered in a forest and killed her samurai husband. Moreover, not only do their versions of events differ from one another, but the testimonies of the wife, her husband (delivered through a medium), and the bandit are in complete contradiction, effectively demonstrating that reality, truth, and above all memory are subject to perspectival distortion and therefore remain impossible to know fully.
Indeed, the true version of events does not exist even within the screenplay itself. Kurosawa deliberately set out to explore different perspectives on a single occurrence, which is why no record of the event itself was ever created — for it is not the event, but the question of shifting interpretations, the subjectivization of truth, and so on, that is the filmmaker’s primary concern. In the face of the impossibility of answering what really happened in the forest, attempts have been made to interpret the film as an allegory of Japan freeing itself — or hoping to free itself — from foreign influence. This interpretation arose primarily because of the scene of a child’s birth near the end of the production and the introduction of classical Japanese music in its final passages, whereas Western-style music dominates earlier on. There is no basis, however, for concluding that this is the correct interpretation; Kurosawa himself noted in his autobiography that the screenplay “depicts human beings who are incapable of living without the lies they tell themselves to feel that they are better people than they actually are.”
On the production side, the director’s admiration for silent cinema left a clear imprint on the film. This is particularly evident in the minimalist set design, the fact that all the action takes place in just three locations (the gate, the forest, and the courtyard where the interrogations are held), and the sparing use of a musical score, which is replaced by natural ambient sounds such as falling rain. The pessimistic and enigmatic mood thus created is further reinforced by the presentation of the action in muted shades of grey, “accidental” cuts, and a camera that drifts across the characters as if uncertain on which face it should ultimately settle.
The weary protagonists, the lashing rain, Tajomaru’s fury in the recalled crime, and the creaking of the sign at the titular gate also generate an atmosphere of persistent unease that communicates itself to the viewer — caused not so much by the violence and cruelty of the crimes as by the frustration of being unable to decipher their origins. The ambiguity is further underscored by the symbolic use of lighting. Sunlight — deployed with particular mastery in the forest scenes — emphasizes Tajomaru’s energy while creating a sharp contrast with the “real” events of the present, bathed in darkness and incessant rain. Furthermore, the contrast between sunlight and darkness reflects the fundamental good-versus-evil dichotomy, most fully visible in the scene of the samurai’s wife yielding to Tajomaru, which takes place at sunset — signalling a transformation in the character, a passage from light-goodness towards darkness-evil and immorality. We also repeatedly observe sunlight filtering through the leaves of trees, suggesting the incompleteness of light and truth alike. This incompleteness means that light in Rashomon ultimately serves less to reveal truth than to fragment it, reflecting a distorted, incomplete, and destabilized perception of reality.
The production also captivated international audiences of the time for other, narrative reasons. Its non-linearity and disregard for chronological order were extraordinarily innovative at the time. From that point on, presenting action through contradictory flashbacks and characters’ accounts became one of the most common narrative devices in cinema and television around the world. The film’s influence extends beyond the moving image: in law and psychology, for instance, the term “Rashomon effect” is used when witnesses give contradictory testimonies.
10/10
