Inédits, “Latest chrysanthemums” (1954) and “As the fall” (1960), the Japanese filmmaker, a painter of affects, are to be discovered in the room since November 10th.
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At the Western viewer, Japanese cinema offers a still largely unexplored story, which has not been done up going back. East proof, two late films and unpublished by Mikio Naruse (1905-1969), last chrysanthemums (1954) and at the fall approach (1960), surface in the directory rooms and complement the knowledge that We had this floating and mysterious filmmaker.
Naruse was a goldsmith of impressions, a climate painter of affects, knowing how to grasp in small keys, never frontally, how the existence is undermined by the secret pains and the ones bues, those which read in the gaze or the silence of others. Attached on a daily basis, his art, an exemplary deduction, drained deep, inconsolable melancholy, like the deposit that gives the heart the simple passage of time.
Child Film
The two works are those, many at the time, which evoke the difficult conditions of the broken families, in Japan after-war, between privations and sacrifices. They have a common decor, the “shitamachi”, the district of the plain of Tokyo, whose name means “low city”, inhabited at the time by the popular classes and picturesque appearance, having aroused all a cinematographic vein .
At the approach of autumn is, moreover, a film of childhood, rare thing at Naruse. Hideo (Kenzaburo Osawa) arrives in Tokyo with his mother, Shigeko (Nobuko Otowa), widow and without resources. She entrusts her son to the guard of his uncle’s grocer while she will work as a hostess in a pleasures. Infamant task that reflects on Hideo, watched corner by his host family, mocked by the neighborhood kids. The child binds from friendship with the little junko, another daughter of hostess, who takes him walk around the bridges or on the roofs of shopping centers.
started in a light tone, the movie turns out to the surreptitious drama. Naruse addresses through his young hero a feeling of disaffiliation: this irradiating area where love is confused with shame, where attachment feels henned by the possibility of abandonment. During a magnificent passage, Hideo and Junko fleights to the seaside, but find only vague fields and areas under construction. They are then the little cousins of the wandering kids of the Italian neorealism or the Antoine Doinel of the four hundred blows: rejects of a modernity that does not want them and promises them anything.
Female maturity.
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