Ani imôto

Machiko Kyô came home pregnant by a young student. The child was stillborn, but the rural family fell apart. Her loving older brother, Masayuki Mori, tormented her until she left for Tokyo, to pursue a life of a prostitute. She comes home to visit occasionally, but her family doesn't know where she lives. When the student she had the affair with comes to find her in hopes of making amends, Mori nearly kills him for what he did and what she has become. Today, Machiko arrives for a festival, with presents.

This is the second of three screen versions of the novel by Saisei Murô. With Mikio Naruse directing, it is probably as good as it can get. Miss Kyô's performance is clearly a performance for the benefit of Mori, whom she still loves, even as he brutalizes her. It's not really a story; no one changes. However, the audience gets to see the revelation of character and can perceive that love can persist, no matter how poorly it is expressed.

This is a very impressive Naruse effort, its reputation somehow lost in the mix between the better-known Repast and Sound of the Mountain. As did Flowing this one completely immerses you in its subjects' lives, capturing you with the gentle but increasingly subtly erratic and ominous rhythms of drama and editing. By the end we've reached a devastating climax fulfilled by a denouement of similarly grim yet beautiful ambiguity. My favourite moment may be the broken countershot near the end, which sets up to imply a flashback only to create a forward ellipse. It caps the film wonderfully.

Machiko Kyo is superb, but Reisaburo Yamamoto and Masayuki Mori overplay without the necessary depth to offset their excess. Yoshiko Kuga has always struck me as an actress who simply reads her lines, and she's bland here as usual but it works for the character. None of this hurts the film, though.