Quelque part sous le ciel immense

Keiji Sada and Yoshiko Kuga and a young married couple. They live over the family store in Tokyo with his old-fashioned, kvetching stepmother, Kumeko Urabe, his sister, Hideko Takamine, and his younger brother, Akira Ishihama. Everyone has issues. Miss Kuga feels picked on for her infomal, small-town ways, Miss Takamine is depressed because she has a limp from an injury during a bombing raid and feels useless, Miss Urabe doesn't understand young people, and Ishihama feels a bit guilty about everything; his friends have to work hard, they're frequently homeless, and everyone picks on everyone else. Things are improving in Japan, but there's still a lot of poverty around.

Sada is the glue who holds everything together. He's hard-working, kind and loving. It's a family comedy, but it's a far more complicated, more fragile family than the sort that Yasujiro Ozu was portraying in his series of movies, and the happiness and survival of the family depends not on recapitulating the relationships and rites, but on figuring out what makes the individual happy, and the family caring enough to support those choices...and even nudging them towards making those choices. It's a fine, complicated mess of a story, with a troupe of top actors, and as they evolve from crabby unhappiness to serene joy, it often seems far more real, telling and instructive than a story.

Somewhere Under the Broad Sky is the fifth movie by Masaki Kobayashi, who would later go on to international fame with movies like The Human Condition and Harakiri. Before making such towering masterpieces however, Kobayashi made a number of light dramas about families of which this movie is a good example. Keiji Sata stars as the son (and head) of a somewhat poor family that owns a liquor store. Yoshiko Kuga is his recently married wife who is struggling to fit into the family. The two love each other but she is having a hard time winning over the rest of his family, particularly his embittered and jealous sister (played by the always great Hideko Takamine) who was disfigured during the war. The movie is a very light drama with not very high stakes in the conflict. It's not a great movie, but it is an example of the many good and enjoyable movies coming out of Japan during the 1950's.

Kobayashi Masaki has made some absolutely essential, must-see classics, but not all his works are equally well-known, and not all are equal in terms of quality, either. This 1954 picture is definitely not one of the man's most celebrated endeavors; how might it hold up compared to its brethren? There is perhaps a reason 'Somewhere under the broad sky' is less renowned - it's a fine film, truly, but not necessarily particularly striking. Even as drama persists the overall tone is very light to the point of diminishing it, observed in the dialogue, the course of events such as it is, Kobayashi's direction, and at length the acting. There's much to appreciate here, and it's worthwhile on its own merits, but maybe not anything special that especially demands to be seen.

There's one scene in the third act that's so dippy it wouldn't be out of place coming from P. G. Wodehouse writing Madeline Bassett. Elsewhere, as the narrative leans on mundane, common ideas like "life is hard" and "the relationship between a woman and the family she has married into," the feature is maudlin and almost kind of questionable as it feels like a contemporary U. S. TV sitcom, or at most a TV family drama of the sort that seemingly proliferated in the 80s and early 90s (one of the many curses of Reaganism). While I don't actually doubt the intent, the sum total nevertheless arguably comes across as less than fully earnest, and it's rather as if Kobayashi and writer Kusuda Yoshiko actively forsook heartier, solemn drama lest they run afoul of cultural norms or some censor's board. (It's not an unreasonable conjecture, seeing as the Allied occupation of Japan following World War II had only ended a couple years before this was released.) There's "lighthearted," and then there's "so light that it may float away on a mild breeze."

Still, it's not as if the title isn't duly well made just as it is. Exceedingly gentle as it may be as written and realized, there are still worthwhile ideas herein: the owner of a local liquor store that just gets by, the young woman struggling to find her place in her husband's family, the sister who is ashamed of her disability, the empathetic young brother who has his head in the clouds, the terse mother-in-law, the values of a society in flux, and so on. The plot rather exists on a plateau, but it's not undeserving, and there is just enough sense of story in the characters and their relationships, and each scene in turn, to keep us interested. In much the same vein the cast do give admirable performances befitting the material, not least Sada Keiji and Kuga Yoshiko, and certainly others including Ishihama Akira and Urabe Kumeko. With splendid cinematography, lovely filming locations, and excellent production design and art direction - not to mention fetching costume design, hair, and makeup - the movie is easy on the eyes, and everyone who contributed behind the scenes did a fine job.

It's debatable at best if all this is enough to earn a specific recommendation; adequately satisfying as 'Somewhere under the broad sky' is,' it does not leave a lasting impression of the type that will have one speak enthusiastically of it to their fellows. Yet not every film needs to be a revelation, or a spellbinding tour de force; sometimes it really is enough to simply Be, and operate on a smaller and less momentous scale. We can discuss the finer points of this flick, but it really is good all told; "less than riveting" does not mean "bad." There's hardly any need to go out of one's way for it, but provided one is receptive to softer fare of this variety, it's still worth checking out on a quiet day if one has the opportunity. And that's perfectly okay.

Knowing that this was both a film by Kobayashi and in his melodrama and romance period, I kept expecting this film to turn in much darker directions than it ever did. Instead of getting a bit of misery wrapped in irony that came to define the ending of Three Loves, I got something much more hopeful and straightforward. It's a fine little film in that regard, about a family growing together and apart at the same time, and it's interesting to note that even with the somewhat nice and almost comparatively mundane aspect of the nature of the storytelling that Kobayashi's sheer talent still manages to shine through so brightly.

Hiroko (Yoshiko Kuga) has married Ryoichi (Keiji Sada), which means that she had married into a family that runs a small liquor store in Tokyo. In addition to her husband there is also her mother-in-law Shige (Kumeko Urabe), her sister-in-law Yasuko (Hideko Takamine) who was left partially lame in one leg in a bombing raid during the war, and her brother-in-law Noboru (Akira Ishihama) who is a student at the university and doesn't offer much to the store's running. There are small household conflicts between Hiroko and, in particular, Shige, mostly about what chores she should be doing. There is also some tension because she is still learning the household ways as well as how to effectively run the store, especially in a moment where she spills some soy sauce right after we've learned how little Ryoichi earns from a large bottle.

The problems aren't her own. Yasuko, in particular, gets a good amount of attention due to her disability and singlehood. She describes herself as an old maid at 28-years-old, and she outright refuses to even meet with a potentially eligible man set up by her mother because he has three fingers missing, the idea being that she won't accept the charity or the pity of needing to be paired with another person maimed by the war. She doesn't know how she wants to fill her time, lying about going to flower arrangement classes and instead going to bicycle races, while giving up her music. She's in a funk.

There is also the presence of a pair of men from hometowns far away. The first is Shinkichi (Ryohei Uchida), a childhood friend of Hiroko's who has come to Tokyo with his sister to try and find work. He tracks down Hiroko and obviously loves her despite the fact that she married another man. They meet a couple of times innocently but suspiciously enough (she goes away from the store when she's supposed to be watching it) that it causes gossip within the house. When he decides to give up on finding work in the city and return home, Hiroko joins him to the train station, and Ryoichi chases after them. Everything ends up innocently enough, though. Hiroko was never going to leave Ryoichi with Shinkichi. I think there was supposed to be a bit of tension around it, but she's too good to leave. At the same time, he's too good to actually take anything out on her. She may be messing up at work, having secret meetings with a former boyfriend, and costing him money when he smooths over any potential doubt by offering a gift of whiskey to Shinkichi, but he'll never take his anger out on her. In one way, Ryoichi is the rock on which the family operates. In another way, he's so trusting that he eliminates some dramatic tension.

Ryoichi is a source of dramatic deflation in another sense as well. We get a lot of talk early about how hard it is for him to make ends meet in the deflationary Japan of the post-war period, especially when he also has to pay all of his taxes, but he seems to have an endless source of money. He gives allowances to both Noboru and Yasuko. He has five thousand yen socked away that he can instantly give Yasuko when she asks for it for a friend whose son is suffering from appendicitis. This ability to find money without any kind of effect on him is another deflationary bit.

Ryoichi really is the dramatic deadweight of the film, but he's not the emotional center. That would be Hiroko. That separation is, I think, what makes the film work where it does. The plot mechanics of Ryoichi finding money is less important that Hiroko finding her place in this family. Her husband's support is necessary so that she can stay there, despite the conflicts that arise. And that journey is really quite nice.

The point of the title comes from a conversation between Noboru and a school friend about how, somewhere out there in the wide world of Tokyo and Japan, there has to be someone for everyone. Ryoichi is Hiroko's somebody, and even Yasuko can find someone. The other friend from back home is Shun-don (Minoru Oki), an old-time flame of Yasuko's from the remote village that the family started from who let things go when Yasuko gained a fiancé during the war. The fiancé was killed in the war, and Yasuko was left lame. We've already seen her intransigence regarding pity husbands, and yet she ends up with real emotion for Shun-don. When he shows up and goes back because she refuses to meet with him, she's soon chasing after him, looking for her own connection.

It's nice. It's not challenging, and it often feels like it's going to go darker than it does, but Kobayashi was still seemingly smarting from the poor reaction to The Thick-Walled Room from Japanese officials. He was making safe fare to keep working, relying heavily on his mentors and friends for stylistic and narrative directions. Still, the emotional throughline of Hiroko in the main and Yasuko in a secondary way is often quite strong. It ultimately just comes to a nice place, with people finding happiness where they can without the sharper edge of Kobayashi's later, more famous work, but as an example of a mid-50s Japanese family drama, it's a nice little entertainment.