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Fascinating look at Westernized Japan in the early 1930s, this is a touching drama of mother love and of a child's love.

This motion picture is quite possibly alien to most United Statesians who likely haven't seen many silent Japanese movies. Japan was much later in adapting to sound than, for example, Hollywood, which began the switch about 1929, and this movie is dated 1932.

"Nasanunaka" is carried by beautiful acting, even by the youngest members of the cast. It is, though, at least slightly marred by some sloppy camera work. Zooms and pans are often jerky and out of focus.

Though the directing is sometimes brilliant, too often there is camera movement that is out of place. For example, there are far too many zooms or forward movements for purposes of showing drama.

Never mind: The story is both touching and dramatic, the acting is nearly impeccable, and all the characters, even if not likable or admirable, are more than interesting.

I cannot over-emphasize how much I like and admire this movie, and I strongly urge everyone to watch. It was shown on TCM Sunday night/Monday morning -- depending on time zone --15 and 16 May 2022. If you get lucky, you might find it online or in a library. I hope you can find it.

A touching melodrama about a custody battle. Yoshiko Okada plays an actress who has won fame and fortune making movies in America. She now returns to Japan hoping to reunite with her six year-old daughter, who currently believes her ex-husband's second wife (Yukiko Tsukuba) is her biological mother. The ex-husband is sent to prison for mismanaging his company's funds, and the wealthy actress has an advantage over the now destitute Tsukuba. The film initially comes off as morally simplistic - Okada is the Westernized woman who is palling around with her two criminal brothers (the younger of whom provides some entertaining comic relief, but in general they aren't very useful characters) and Tsukuba is the noble, more traditionally Japanese woman who's willing to throw herself in front of a car to save her stepdaughter - but the characterization is beautifully done. In the end, both Okada and Tsukuba come off as sympathetic. Okada is the clear MVP among the actors - her final moment in particular is incredible. The little girl is absolutely adorable. Some things could be clearer. I was never clear who exactly the guy with the beard who helps Tsukuba was supposed to be. A friend? A brother? I feel like I missed something there. The filmmaking is wonderfully dynamic - tons of pans and tracking shots and perfectly edited. This one is pretty close to great.

"I think it's raising a child, not giving birth to one, that makes a woman a mother."

In a nutshell: a wealthy actor returns from Hollywood to Japan to seek out the biological daughter she left behind, and taking advantage of her ex-husband's bankruptcy, she abducts the girl over both the child's and stepmother's wishes. What follows is a drama that's remarkable for having broached the topic of the rights of biological/step mothers in 1932, and for having done so with such honesty.

There is a sense of vibrancy in this film created from the emotions involved for each of its three main female characters (the little girl included), but also from the camera work and editing. Director Mikio Naruse gives us montage sequences, lots of long zooms into the faces of his actors, and plenty of freedom for them to express themselves. Yoshiko Okada (the biological mom) and Yukiko Tsukuba (the stepmom) have several fine moments even if Naruse falls in love with zooming in on them a little too much, reducing the potency of the effect. Even the little girl (Toshiko Kojima) is allowed to show her emotions in unvarnished ways, at one point saying "Grandma, why do you keep me in this house? I'm starting to hate you too."

All of these things help overcome issues with the story, which is so simple that it lags at times, and resolves itself too conveniently. The poignant separation doesn't land with quite as much punch as it could have because the actor was hard to sympathize with. Aside from the kidnapping that's out of the blue, we've learned that she had run off with another man five years earlier, leaving her husband and baby. It's clear she's learned a bitter lesson in life, but a little more nuance would have helped. Meanwhile, of the male characters, I loved the pickpocket who adds a bit of comic relief, but it's a little unfortunate that the wonderful little grifting scheme he has going with his buddy never went anyway after the opening scene.

Overall, though - a fine and engaging effort, one that I really enjoyed.

The film opens with a whip pan blurring a 360 circle around a middle-class Tokyo neighborhood and an intertitle popping-up to announce 'Thief!'. A crowd runs across the street and clamors around a man. Outraged at the accusations, he makes a vehement public display, a show, that allows him to extricate himself. Only in the following scene do we recognize that we were, in fact, tricked. All this prefigures main tenets in the film about trickery, motion, acting, bargains, subterfuge, moral dilemmas and cleverly situates us inside the movie as part of the crowd of onlookers who will have to surmise a plot from the spirals of deceit.

Ordinarily it would be about sex and money as the main objects of power. Here the coveted treasure is a child. Motherhood is the social role worth deceiving for. The plot is about a famous Hollywood actress coming back from the Americas to reclaim the daughter she abandoned. Meanwhile the child is growing up with her dad and stepmother.

So a double perspective is what we have, on one hand the love and safety of the family nest, but which exists on a certain dishonesty on the part of the father and the ability of the stepmother to perform a role, on the other hand the biological mother who really wishes to atone and make good, noble intentions but once more obscured by deceit and pretending. The father is sent to prison for financial mismanagement, karmic payback.

So the first layer is successful, a melodrama but structured in such a way as to allow us to recast tumultuous dramatic life as a matter of theatric conventions. The household is the stage. Actresses vie for control of the kid's innocent gaze. The larger world is the adults' organized cruelty.

This is fine. But there is no additional layer as a way of annotating the first in terms of images being performed. This would involve our gaze next to the kid's. The camera would travel around the edges of who these people present themselves to be. Instead you will notice that the camera is always thrust in the face of the participants, head-on, anxious, like a mic set up for a comment. They comment but always as expected after first meeting them.

The audience is never really outwitted as promised by the opening scene of deceit in broad daylight. There is never any serious doubt about who the daughter belongs with. Morally the thing is of simple value.

Sternberg was getting this part right at around the same time, staging images in a way that we became complicit in dreaming about them.