Daughters, Wives and a Mother
(Musume tsuma haha)
With Hara Setsuko, Mori Masayuki, Takamine Hideko.
Japan, 1960, 35mm, black & white, 123 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Naruse’s star-studded TohoScope melodrama deals with the emblematic trials and tribulations of a large bourgeois family in the wake of one member’s sudden death. True to the title, the film’s roundelay of multigenerational tensions centers around the family’s various women, all of whom have different ideas about what to do with the aging matriarch Aki (Mimasu Aiko). Some are overly preoccupied with their percentage of an insurance policy payout, while others, like the newly widowed and introverted Sanae (Hara Setsuko), aim to facilitate a smooth, dignified path into old age for her mother while dealing with the romantic pressures forced upon her by her overzealous family. Meanwhile, Aki herself bemoans the materialistic tendencies of her younger relatives who “only know how to look pretty” and occupy themselves with a floundering advertising business. Naruse captures these tensions between modernity and tradition in meticulously arranged compositions that privilege no single perspective over another even as the narrative gently builds towards an affirmation of the quotidian pleasures gleaned from age and experience. – Carson Lund
Part of film series
Upcoming screenings from this program
Anzukko
Mother
Sincerity
Summer Clouds
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
Summer Clouds
The Stranger within a Woman
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
Traveling Actors
Scattered Clouds
Scattered Clouds
Flowing
A Wanderer’s Notebook
Repast
Every-Night Dreams
Street Without End
Apart From You
No Blood Relation
The Road I Travel with You / Avalanche
