Avalanche

It's hard to believe that this is a Toho production, the company that would become synonymous for the goofy franchise that is Godzilla.

It tells the story of a marriage that despite only being less than a year old is already struggling. The husband has grown unhappy and has his eye on another woman, but what should he do?

Nadare otherwise known as Avalanche is a very slow paced movie that truth be told became really rather boring. To make matters worse I struggled to care about many of the characters, especially our lead. How could I possibly care about this guys plight?

The whole thing builds to a very bleak grim finale that I certainly didn't see coming and again underlines my surprise that these are the same people who brought us countless goofy giant monster movies.

Despite the finale this could have been so much better if only it didn't drag so much and was a tad more engaging. It's surprising in fact that it could drag at all as it's only just an hour in length.

Grim heartbreaking stuff.

The Good:

Has its moments

The Bad:

Really badly drags

Ending is very hard hitting and questionably needless

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

Early Japan cinema was merciless!

Mikio Naruse is one of cinema's greatest directors, and for those who have never heard of him I would strongly suggest starting with, 'Nadare' or 'Avalanche' as it is known in English. Do not expect an outer disaster but find out how inner disaster feels as the inner-self threatens to smother and destroy you. A man no longer loves his wife, who adores him, but believes he loves a less dependant woman (dependant as in mutual loving) and very nearly destroys his wife's life and his. And yet despite this sombre theme, which Naruse amazingly shows us in just under one hour, I felt at the end that I knew these characters better than any other film I have seen recently. Why? The 'plot' sounds familiar, or does it? Not as Naruse portrays it, with seamless scenes dissolving into each other, and with the use of interior monologues that we too enter in to the heart of this emotional catastrophe. I thought of Eugene O'Neill and his play 'Strange Interlude' and its world of outer and inner dialogue. I will give no more spoilers, but I must mention how fluid the film is, and the quietness of the film despite its subject matter, and the discussions, and the natural talking make our current way of film dialogue (even among the best directors) look contrived. But this is not all; the film presents a Japan in transition, opening up to the West, and the slow discarding of old values. It is subtle, and I can evoke this in one scene. A husband and wife talking, in a house filled with traditional Japanese furniture and up to date (1937) western furniture; a weird combination of an English country house, but with these two stark contrasts. Plus the clothes; the man dressed as any westerner would, and in front of him, his wife in full traditional garb When you look closely you see an old order, centuries old, folding seamlessly together as Naruse uses his fraction of a second dissolves. This short masterpiece tells you more about what it means to love, and also what it means for a whole country changing its centuries-old ways. Basically it asks, do we just love ourselves or do we love others, and how do we perceive the concept of loving anyway? Quite a feat in just under an hour. It is available to see on YouTube and I urge all who are truly interested in the complexities of life, and the need to see a reality beyond the many films with actors behaving like the robots we may all become in the future.

When watching this film I can't help but to feel that we haven't advanced very much in 70 years. Asides from the music, and somewhat classic way the picture is shot, this movie can easily be a contemporary piece. The motivation and lifestyle of the characters in this movie aren't any different from people living in the world today.

Goro is a spoiled brat from an affluent family in 1930s Japan. He has two lovers Yayoi and Fukiko. His parents wants him to marry Fukiko, but he can't give up Yayoi either. He talks much about ideal life, but his father brushes him off saying his ideas have no basis in reality. In his spiteful mood he plan an ultimate coup against his father, a plot to commit suicide with Fukiko, but then his selfish and spineless nature rears its ugly head.

The backdrop of this movie shows surprisingly contemporary scenery. The house, the furniture, and the road aren't much different from the way we live today, which makes you wonder how much we've advanced in quality of life.

Despite its title Nadare (Avalanche), there is no physical avalanche happening anywhere within this movie.

The movie is somewhat short (just under 60 minutes) and is difficult to find these days, but if you can find it it's an interesting cultural piece from the '30s Japan.

Hideo Saeki wants to divorce meek, uninteresting Noboru Kiritachi so he can be with Ranko Edogawa; not for him the antiquated hypocrisy of pretending to monogamy while keeping a mistress. He knows what he knows and must be true to himself. His father tells him that a man has responsibilities and knowing things is not the same thing as understanding them.

Naruse's drama has definite Brechtian overtones in which thoughts and ideas are at war with systems. Like many a Brecht piece, it is all about ideas and talk talk talk, and this movie shows that Naruse has gone full talkie mode. He tries to disguise this with a lot of moving shots, in which two people hold long, philosophical conversations while walking along a street or through a forest, but he doesn't succeed with his unlikable characters doing selfish things. Many directors who were talented in the silent era, when confronted with sound, floundered, and here Naruse, despite his efforts to keep things moving, doesn't succeed.

You might wish to see this out of a sense of completeness, nonetheless. Not only is Naruse coming back into focus these days as a talented and worthy director, but his First Assistant Director is on this movie is Ishiro Honda, better known as the director of GODZILLA and the frequent A.D. of Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa is only the Third Assistant Director of this movie.

This is so unbearably bad at face value, it gets you thinking. It has to be a sort of exercise, a put-on. It simply cannot be what appears to be.

The plot is about the scion of a wealthy family who wants to pursue his heart outside of social decree, and efforts of his father to steer him back into responsibility and ethos. It is a typical plot for Naruse, except here strangely trivialized, treated as a petulant game of feelings.

The easy thing to note is that Naruse is striving for a Brechtian effect; dramatic life so paper-thin and transparent before our eyes, structure so clear, it is exposed for the contrived fabrication it is. Characters mouth off the entire plot between them and every important moment has to be paused for the participants to explain inner turmoil, hushed whispers to the camera, our presence acknowledged.

The other is a little more intricate, a similar mechanism. The clue I believe, is the photo-book being flicked through by a girl in the opening scene.

The film is cut together so that time and different characters are blurred together, flattened, dissolved and merged as cutouts from the pages of the book. The film unfolds as possible story-fragments pieced together from nondescript images of the participants on the page – after the fact? entirely fictional and imagined?

And notice something else. Everyone is dressed in Western garb, stylish and ultra-modern, except for the naive young wife who is draped in a kimono. The father remarks that her traditional hairdo looks strange. The family house is a majestic pagoda, as seen in photos, but the interior is decorated in lavish Western fashion.

This is very cleverly annotated stuff, transparent fiction plus layers hiding the author; overblown melodrama as idle daydreaming of a misty-eyed Japanese girl, populating ordinary photographs with a wild imagination from movies – the movie limited by her limited imagination. She might as well be the bored housemaid, embroiling herself in imaginary intrigue and tragic love.

It was all lies, claims the son inside the nested fiction, after having proposed a - fake - double suicide.