Learn from Experience, Part I
(Kafuku zempen)
With Takada Minoru, Irie Takako, Takehisa Chieko.
Japan, 1935, 35mm, black & white, 78 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Opulence, sleek attire and tear-inducing excess characterize Naruse’s ultimate film at P.C.L. before the adventurous studio was absorbed into Toho. Learn from Experience—in Japanese better rendered as “ups and downs” or “adversities and blessings”—is sourced from a popular novel by author Kikuchi Kan, otherwise infamous for his embrace of warmongering imperial nationalism in the 1930s. This two-part domestic melodrama takes from Kikuchi a concerted interest in the extravagance of westernized nouveau riche ways of living: European high fashion and impractical furniture abound, as do imported cars, alcohol and jazz. Yet Naruse—anything but an artist of the bourgeoisie—twists and deforms the earnest literary foundation into a far more contradictory object. The depicted love triangle of arranged marriages and a child born out of wedlock produces supremely pathetic narrative convulsions that often ring hollow: uninspired or frustrated with his script, Naruse opts for observational long shots that distance as much as they empathize. Meanwhile, the final act’s sudden restoration of patriarchal authority is subverted and taken apart by emotional overkill of the type of which Douglas Sirk would be proud. Atmospheric images of floating clouds, sleepy rivers and urban technomodernity appear lifted straight out of Ozu (or the other way around), except they here operate in the service of irony rather than transcendence. – Nace Zavrl
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
