Mikio Naruse | 乱れる (Midareru) (Yearning) / 1964

the shock of truth

by Douglas Messerli

 

Zenzo Matsuyama (screenplay), Mikio Naruse (director) 乱れる (Midareru) (Yearning) / 1964

 

Having now seen my third Mikio Naruse film, I am beginning to think that, although his subjects and themes are limited, he may be a better director than those of his generation, Ozu and Mizoguchi. This is an extreme overstatement, of course, and I have never been a critic who pits great directors against one another, although I do have some obvious preferences when it comes to French film. In this case, all three deal with trapped, yet forceful women, although Ozu’s heroines more often find solace in the family. But there is a kind of feminist strength in Naruse’s characters that makes them far more complex and interesting, leaving us, at film’s end, to want to still know them better.

      Not that the hard-working widow, Reiko Morita (Hideko Takamine) would allow herself to imagine that she is a feminist or even that she lives a complex life. For her, survival is a necessary thing, and working in a small mom and pop grocery store for 8 years after her husband’s death is simply something that she sees as her responsibility. Besides, her mother-in-law is now quite elderly, and that woman’s two other older daughters have husbands and jobs of their own. And who else would care for her husband’s younger brother Koji (Yūzō Kayama), although he has gone to college and worked for a short period at a job, is now a troublesome loafer, who prefers to drink and gamble, now and again getting into fights? 

    Reiko treats the young man as a mother might, lying for him and cooking late meals when he arrives home, sometimes after midnight. The one thing he seems to most enjoy is to eat, and we see the handsome boy several times in this film shoveling in whatever Reiko serves him.

    In any other film, particularly if it were to have been made slightly later, we might have even imagined that the morose and alcoholic brother-in-law is an unhappy gay man, but that is not what plays out in this far more complex heterosexual film.

     Reiko, from the very beginning of this film, begins to sense that something is in the wind, that despite her dedication to family and the traditions of the past, something is beginning to dreadfully change. First of all, a new supermarket has opened up in her part of town, and, as a dreadful advertising truck announces time and again, its prices are much lower than the older, smaller grocers. Consequently, she and other small store owners have begun to lose customers. One local shop owner, foreseeing financial collapse, commits suicide.

     Koji and his sisters, however, see what’s coming clearer than Reiko, and Koji becomes determined to turn his small shop into a larger supermarket. Although Reiko has been unbelievable loyal to the family, the two sisters do not wish to have her be one of the corporate heads, while argues to do so would only be just. Naruse demonstrates their lack of feeling through dozens of tiny gestures, a flip of the hand or a turn of a head, as they attempt to convince their mother that it is time for Reiko to remarry and move on.

     Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending upon your viewpoint), Reiko is unaware of their hostility and Koji’s plans, and feels it’s still her duty to remain and keep the store going as best as she can.

    When Koji finally does tell her about selling the shop, he has also tells her another secret that finally forces her hand: he has left he job because he did not want to leaver her sine he is and always has been in love with her. This is now the kind of drama that one might imagine in US melodramatists such as Douglas Sirk, and the results are equally “over the top.”

     That confession alters the very atmosphere of the shop, as the two, Reiko and Koji circle in avoidance of one another. The only way to end the potent push and pull between them is for Reiko to go, as she suddenly determines to return to her original family home in another city.

     Many a Naruse film would end there, but this time he appears ready to take us into that new complexity of character, as Koji followers her, and the two are drawn even closer and closer together as the train moves forward into space.  

     In his intelligent review in Slant, critic Ken Uhlich captures the experience:

 

“What ensues is probably Naruse’s most brilliantly sustained sequence. As the train races on to an unspecified destination, Reiko and Koji play out a romantic, yet foreboding courtship-in-miniature. The melodramatic tensions of the second act fade away (it is as if the characters have gone beyond the movie they inhabited into entirely new surroundings) and it seems possible that the duo can build a life together. But their initial sense of excitement (one that Naruse implies could only continue if the train never stopped) eventually erodes, and with the end of the characters’ journey comes a kind of emotional atrophy.”

     As I write, there is a kind of lightness here as the two gradually move closer and closer to one another, and at one stop, where Koji leaves the train to eat, Keiko signals him to quickly return before the train leaves the station.      Perhaps these two, we might imagine, can actually find a way to break with customs relation to their age different and family internal relationships. Before they arrive at her hometown, Reiko even suggests that they spend the night in a small mountain town.

    There the air is almost white with a thick fog, intimating that she will be unable to see her way to clarity. Once more she tells Koji that his love cannot be returned, offering him, like a child, a ring made of string.

     Like so many nights in the past, Koji finds his way to a bar. Upon awakening the next morning, Reiko watches for her window men carrying a dead body they have discovered under a cliff. Observing the ring of string on the man’s finger, Reiko pulls back in horror much like Brecht’s Mother Courage, in the realization of her lack of ability to change and speak her heart has been responsible, in part, for Koji’s death.

     This is a truly powerful film, one of the best of the great tradition of Japanese cinema.

 

Los Angeles, January 2, 2017

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (January 2017).