Midareru

I have binge watching Naruse films and have liked all but one. Yearning may be the moving both as a love story and as a story of social change. The theme of small businesses being run out by large corporations is as timely today in the US as it was in 1964 Japan. The two leads are terrific and have great chemistry. Highly recommended

In the War, Hideko Takamine married a soldier. He was killed within six months. His family's liquor store was caught in a bombing raid, and while most of the community fled, she singlehandedly worked to rebuild the business. Now eighteen years have passed and the store and the family are prosperous. However, there are two new supermarkets in town, drawing all the business. Yûzô Kayama, her husband's younger brother, has been strangely lazy. He had a job with a good corporation, but quit. Instead of working at the store, he spends his days loafing. Yet he is smart enough to realize that, with the store's good location, there is an answer: convert to a supermarket. The family is enthusiastic. His sisters' husbands are willing to back the expanded venture in return for directorships, and the sisters are ecstatic. Yûzô says that Hideko will have to be an executive; she has, after all, saved the family and run the store for almost two decades. The sisters think this is ridiculous; she is not, they insist, a blood relative. Nothing gets done. Hideko is only vaguely aware of the proposal, because her brother-in-law won't talk about it. then he tells her the secret he has been silent about for so long:he is in love with her.

Here's Mikio Naruse again, plowing the same patch he did for so many years, the Shomin-Gekim. He was often compared to Ozu, to his own detriment. Although he produced masterpieces, there is nowhere near as much consideration of his work. He did not concern himself with the workings of the family, but with the individual, usually the oppressed woman (although Kamaya suffers for his love, Miss Takamine is not even permitted to consider the matter): very bad! His focus is not the collective. He does not plant his camera humbly on the mat and look at his subject through long, unmoving takes: very bad! How is a film critic supposed to recognize his style? He does not use the same actors, over and again, in much the same roles: very bad! A true auteur tells the same story, over and over! His characters suffer the strictures of society, with only private tears: very bad! The bourgeouisie win again!

It's a false dichotomy, as if by admiring Ozu more, we must despise his colleagues. I admire Ozu greatly, and I also admire Naruse, who told his tales of woe with great compassion and despair, and did so with fine actors. As he does here.

The first part of this film makes it look like its main focus is going to be on one of the perils of capitalism, that of large companies driving smaller ones out of business by moving into a neighborhood and undercutting them on prices, kind of like a much more serious version of Supermarket Woman (1996). I thought my review might start with, people, if you value your mom and pop shops, for the of god, stop shopping at Walmart and Amazon. That is certainly a component here, but this film broadens into so much more, dealing with societal expectations for Japanese women and slowly developing an incredibly touching romance.

Hideko Takemine plays Reiko, the widowed daughter-in-law who has been running a grocery store for her in-law family for 18 years, since the end of WWII. She built the store on her own while the rest of the family fled to the countryside to avoid Allied bombing, and lost her beloved husband to the war. A large supermarket moves in and begins taking her shop's business, but worse yet, her sisters-in-law, their husbands, and her mother-in-law have hatched a plan to tear down the grocery and build a supermarket of their own. Despite everything she's done for them, they want her out of the picture, either through re-marriage or relegation to a minor job in the new store.

Resisting this plan is the younger brother (Yuzo Kayama), who was just 7 years old when his brother met Reiko, so perhaps 10-15 years younger than her. (I was surprised this was the actual age difference between Kayama and Takemine, since Takemine at 40 looks so young and is absolutely gorgeous, but I digress.) The younger brother is a bit of a profligate, gambling, sleeping around with women, and staying out to all hours and getting drunk. He stands up for Reiko, and we soon find out that in addition to his sense of fairness, it's because he harbors feelings for her.

Reiko seems like the epitome of ideal womanhood, something which is as limiting as it is unfair. She holds a torch for her late husband with no desire to remarry, and selflessly works away with a smile. She would rather sacrifice her own feelings than complain or cause antagonism. Her emotions are generally well concealed, but Takemine is masterful in revealing them as the story places out. Watch the look of shock and horror on her face when the younger man declares himself, the tears coming to her eyes on the train, or her conflicted look when denying him even after admitting she loves him. She's brilliant.

It seems like it would be the easiest thing in the world for her to be happy in a new marriage, but she's weighted down with feeling a need to stay loyal to her dead husband, what others will think about the age difference, and how she'll be ruining this young guy's promising life. She's a genuinely virtuous person, but I got the sense that she had also internalized too much of the societal expectation to be perfectly selfless. A long, overnight train ride through the country and growing attachment between the pair leads to swirling emotions and unforgettable scenes, played so well by both Takemine and Kayama. Great stuff from Mikio Naruse.

I saw this film in French, with the title "Une Femme Dans La Tourmente". A year later I still think about it. Postwar Japan is gearing up for the period of "rapid growth", and many of the small family-owned businesses and the families that run them are being swept away. Reiko has supported her late husband's family with her indefatigable work throughout the war and still cooks, cleans and takes up the slack. The family was quite happy to take advantage of her hard work during the hard days, but now that their remaining son is old enough to marry they find her an embarrassment. The son is a lazy young man, used to going with the flow and frankly not trying very hard at anything. When a modern supermarket chain comes to their area, many small shops are going to the wall. Should they continue to struggle on as they are, or sell out for what they can get? Reiko faces her own decision: stay or go? And if she goes, where?

Mikio Naruse is of the same generation as Kurosawa, Ozu and Mitzoguchi, but he is less well known. His films have much in common with those of Yasujiro Ozu. His main themes are family relations and the tension between tradition and modernisation in Japan after World War II. His female characters are on average stronger than the women in Ozu films.

"Yearning" is one of his latest and highly rated films. It is typical of his whole oeuvre. Tradition versus modernisation is represented by the mom and dad stores threatened by the rise of supermarkets. The strong woman is the young widow who has build up the mom and dad store of her parents in law after her husband died in World War II. Family complications arise when the family (mostly the daughters) plans to sell the premise of the store to a supermarket and wants to get rid of their sister in law. That they rap up this message in the form of concern (isn't it time for their sister in law to remarry?) makes is no less selfish.

With the widowed sister in law as the only likeable character in the film one almost has has to think of "Tokyo story" (1953, Yasujiro Ozu).