Les vicissitudes de la vie I

Minoru Takada and Takako Irie are lovers and in love. They want to get married, but he has not told his parents. Now they want him him in an arranged marriage to Chieko Takehisa. Irie tells Miss Takehisa he will refuse and heads home. There, though, he hears all the sensible reasons for the marriage. He doesn't tell them about Miss Irie. Instead, he agrees to the meeting, planning to reject her. However, he discovers that he likes Miss Takehisa a lot. He tells her about the affair. She is not shocked. She says that if he can let Miss Irie down easy, she will marry him. Yet, when he returns, he avoids his former lover.

Mikio Naruse's movie is a story about older customs and habits.... and men's indifference to the suffering of women. Miss Irie wears traditional Japanese garb, while Miss Takehisa is very modern. Miss Irie wants to be married to Takada, while Miss Takehisa would like it, but it's not the be-all of her life. And Takada is a suave, emotionally lazy user. It's a first-rate potboiler of the sort of movie that Naruse would develop into an art.

Naruse Mikio directed four films in 1937. The atmospheric and dark Nadare (Avalanche) is my favorite of these, whereas Nyonin aishu (A Woman's Sorrows) was a minor work in comparison to his other 30's catalog.

The terribly-named Learn From Experience is not a preachy film as the English title would suggest, but a traditional and a bit western-styled melodrama. The storyline brought to mind silent romances starring Lillian Gish, and later Warner Brothers weepies with Bette Davis. The lead character is Toyomi (Irie Takako), a traditional girl who is in love with Shintaro (Takada Minoru), a young man who is aiming for diplomatic service. Shintaro wants to marry Toyomi and they spend the night together, causing her to become pregnant. Afterwards however, Shintaro's parents refuse to let their son marry a girl from a lower class and insist, that he marries a girl of their choosing, Yurie (Takehisa Chieko). Shintaro has to make a difficult decision, but in the end he is weak, and marries the richer girl. The second half of the film follows Toyomi and Yurie becoming friends...

The narrative is easy to follow due to the small number of characters. Both films are about 75 minutes, the normal length for a Japanese films at the time. Since especially the second half drags on a little, I see no reason why Naruse couldn't have cut this into one two-hour film. A more compact duration would make this more watchable.

For a Naruse film, this is very story-driven, which might have to do with the source novel. As always, the director shines in the depiction of women, and Toyomi, her best friend, as well as Yurie are all nicely fleshed-out characters. I liked the way Naruse uses wardrobe to portray the women's personalities. Toyomi is constantly wearing a kimono to show, that she is an old-fashioned girl. Her best friend has western-styled clothing, and Yurie's outfits are straight out of a Joan Crawford movie.

In the beginning, the two girls discuss how marriage to a woman is always some kind of a gamble, since you never know what kind of a man you end up with. Shintaro, who is played by Takada Minoru, who shined in some of Ozu's early silents, is not a very strong-willed or interesting character. This is a woman's film, at times very pleasant to watch, but it really could be shorter.