A Mother Should Be Loved (母を恋はずや, 1934)

In support of the BFI, one of the many companies to lose their stock in the Sony warehouse fire in Enfield, I ordered their dual format edition of Late Autumn / A Mother Should Be Loved last week. A Mother Should Be Loved (母を恋はずや, 1934) is one of the few extant Yasujiro Ozu films that I had not yet seen. Although the first and last of 9 reels that make up the film are missing, enough remains of the film to make it enjoyable viewing.

A Mother Should Be Loved is the type of family melodrama that was common at the time. It tells the story of two school-aged brothers from a wealthy home whose father (Yukichi Iwata) dies suddenly. Their mother Chieko Kajiwara (Mitsuko Yoshiwara), with the support of an old friend of their father’s whom they call Uncle Okazaki (Shinyo Nara) and his wife (Shinobu Aoki).

As the Kajiwara brothers grow up, it becomes apparent to them that their mother tends to favour the elder brother Sadao (Seiichi Kato/Den Obinata) over her younger son Kosaku (Shusei Nomura/Koji Mitsui). It is not until Sadao applies for college and sees his birth certificate for the first time that the family secret is revealed: he is the son of his father’s late first wife and Chieko is only his stepmother. Sadao’s bitterness over this well-intentioned family deception leads to a rift between the two brothers that the plot tries to resolve.

Visually, the film is unlike Ozu’s later style apart from a few favourite motifs such as clothes hanging to dry, factory chimneys, and trains. The house that the family lives in until the father’s death has a European furnishings which more resemble the set of an early Carl Dreyer film than an Ozu film. As the family’s financial circumstances become more difficult they move to a more modest Japanese-style home.

The most fascinating element of A Mother Should Be Loved that I would like to learn more about is Ozu’s use of poster art in the film. The mother is strongly associated with Christian imagery in the film in the form of a poster for the Passion Play Tercentenary in Oberammergau. In 1634, the residents of this small town in Bavaria made a pledge to God that if they were spared from the bubonic plague they would produce a play every ten years depicting the life and death of Jesus. With a few exceptions, the play has been performed every 10 years since. The event advertised in the poster in A Mother Should Be Loved was exploited by the Nazis as part of their greater anti-Semitic agenda and Hitler himself even attended one of the performances. It would be interesting to find out how much Ozu understood about the context of the event itself.  He certainly would not have know about Hitler visiting.  The film was released in May 1934 and Hitler saw the Passion Play in August 1934.  Without all the historical baggage, the cross on the poster merely functions metaphorically to suggest that the mother is adhering to the Christian principle of self-sacrifice.

In contrast, the brothel that Sadao moves into when he runs away from the family home has its walls papered with Hollywood and European movie posters.  The most striking of these is a stylized poster of Joan Crawford in Lewis Milestone's Rain (1932). Here is a screencap from the film alongside the original full colour poster:

This is quite appropriate for a brothel as Joan Crawford plays a prostitute on a path to redemption and a life on the straight and narrow.  Many critics complain that A Mother Should Be Loved is "marred by melodrama" (Donald Richie, Ozu, p. 219), but it is really quite tame in comparison to the over-the-top melodrama of Rain (a film which I coincidentally saw for the first time in Japan - I picked it up in a 500 yen bargain bin several years ago).

Another poster in the brothel is for the G.W. Pabst epic Don Quichotte (The Adventures of Don Quixote, 1933) starring the wildly popular Russian operatic bass Feodor Chaliapin (spellings vary in different European countries).  It was the first sound film adapation of Miguel de Cervantes's novel and three versions were shot - French, English,and German - with Chaliapin singing in all three versions.  I couldn't find the poster used in the film but to get an idea of how it looked in colour I have found a different poster for the film as well as a poster for a theatrical version that uses a similar graphic design:

Alexander Jacoby, who wrote the introductory essay in the BFI booklet, remarks upon the thematic similarities between a A Mother Should Be Loved and the Julien Duvivier classic Poil de carotte (The Read Head, 1932) about a boy who is unloved by his parents.  Like the Passion Play poster, the poster for Poil de carotte is made all the more poignant from the perspective of today because the child star Robert Lynen, in the title role of François Lepic was executed by the Gestapo for his role in the French Resistance in 1944.

The final movie poster that I recognized in A Mother Should Be Loved is for the film Die Tochter des Regiments (The Daughter of the Regiment, 1933).  The film was directed by Carl Lamac and stars his wife (or ex-wife - they divorced sometime in 1933) Anny Ondra (most famous for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Blackmail) and Werner Fuetterer.  This is the most rare of the films referred to in A Mother Should Be Loved.  I do not know if a copy of it is extant, but it most certainly has never been released on DVD.  I would presume that the film is an adaptation of the Donizetti comic opera La fille du régiment (The Daughter of the Regiment, 1840)

A Mother Should Be Loved sparked my interest in learning more about the kinds of films Ozu was watching in the 1920s and 1930s and what he thought about them.  Such a shame that so many of his early films were lost as I am sure they would shed even more light onto craft of this endlessly fascinating film director.  

Humanity and Paper Balloons (人情紙風船, 1937)

When he was still an assistant director, one day [Akira] Kurosawa visited the open set where Sadao Yamanaka was shooting Humanity and Paper Balloons (Ninjo Kamifusen, 1937). It was the scene where the unemployed ronin (masterless samurai) Matajuro, played by Chojuro Kawarazaki, tries to hand over a letter of entreaty to a senior official. What Kurosawa never forgot about that day was that even though the weather was perfectly fine, everybody was just standing around idly, peering up at the sky. He learned that they were waiting for a cloud to waft over a warehouse on the set.

- Teruyo Nogami, Waiting on the Weather , p. 17

I like this anecdote from Teruyo Nogami’s memoir because it sums up the type of conscientious director that Sadao Yamanaka was. There is not a false not in Yamanaka’s final film Humanity and Paper Balloons (人情紙風船/Ninjō kami fūsen, 1937). From the beautifully rendered transitions between scenes to the impeccable ensemble timing of the Zenshin-za acting troupe, the film has been so well planned as to seem effortless.

Nogami’s anecdote also brings to attention one of the important motifs of the first half of Humanity and Paper Balloons: the clouds in the sky. In contrast to the claustrophobic streets and tenements of ancient Edo, the shots of the open sky seem to symbolize the dreams of a better future for the two main protagonists: Shinza the Barber (Kan’emon Nakamura) and and impoverished ronin Matajuro Unno (Chojuro Kawarazaki). Both men have ambitions to move up in the world but are thwarted at every turn by the restraints of the feudalism of the Tokugawa era.

Shinza tries to make money by running an underground gambling establishment but the Yatagoro Gang, with its ties to the weathly merchants like Shirakoya Pawn Shop and the samurai gentry like Mori, threaten him with violence if he continues to encroach upon their turf. Unno’s late father was indentured to Mori as a samurai and for reasons not made clear became a ronin. In the hopes of providing a more comfortable life for his wife, Unno tries to seek favour from Mori with a letter from his father that contains evidence that Mori gained his position thanks to Unno’s father’s support. However, self-serving Mori goes out of his way to avoid contact with Unno.

The story unfolds with the inevitability of a Shakespearean tragedy: we know that it is not going to end well, but the drama is so riveting that we cannot look away. In the accompanying booklet to the Eureka! Masters of Cinema DVD of this film, Shinji Aoyama (director of Eureka and Tokyo Koen – which just won the Golden Leopard at Locarno) writes that Yamanaka learned his techniques from Hollywood cinema of the 20s and 30s – and I must admit that I was often reminded of the timing of dialogue in classic films like Howard Hawks’s Scarface (1932) and Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934) – especially in the scenes featuring Shinza the barber. The way in which Shinza brought the action through the tenement houses when being chased made me wonder what fun Buster Keaton would have had if given traditional Japanese houses as a prop for his stunts. Yamanaka did a great job of exploiting the depth of space possible with Japanese houses in the summer.

Yamanaka uses a floor level camera quite often in Humanity and Paper Balloons – a stylistic element that has traditionally in Western film studies been attributed to Yasujiro Ozu, but seeing it used in Humanity and Paper Balloons solidifies for me the fact that it is really just the best camera angle for capturing action that is taking place in traditional Japanese settings. When characters are seated on tatami – be it in a home setting or in a drinking establishment – the best way to capture medium or medium long shots of the characters is to have the camera operator seated on the floor as well. Also interesting is Yamanaka’s preference for a stable, unmoving camera in Humanity and Paper Balloons – it matches well with the theme of lack of social mobility. Although the film may have an historical setting, this theme must have been one that audiences in 1937 could identify with: the Shogunate may have been dispensed with by then, but life under the military dictatorship of the period meant that people’s life choices were similarly limited.

The final image in Humanity and Paper Balloons is that of one of the kamifusen (paper balloons) that Unno’s wife makes in her spare time floating in the gutter. The kamifusen is a traditional Japanese toy that is delightful to play with, but whose usefulness is fleeting at they tear easily or are destroyed by contact with water or fire. In the context of the film, I have always read this final image of the kamifusen as signifying the fragility of human existence. It is somehow made all the more poignant knowing that this would be Yamanaka’s final film before being set to Manchuria where he fell ill and passed away much too soon.  Yamanaka's films themselves proved as transient as the kamifusen of Unno's wife, with only three of them surviving the war and neglect of the twentieth century.

I was reminded of this metaphor of ephemerality last week when the riots in England destroyed in a matter of hours the livelihoods and homes of so many handworking people. Eureka! Video – the distributor for Humanity and Paper Balloons in the UK was one of the independent companies affected by the destruction of the Sony DADC warehouse in Enfield during the London Riots. Although they work on a much smaller scale than Criterion in the States, their DVD releases are all topnotch and have made available many films like Humanity and Paper Balloons that had never been available with English subtitles before. I wish them the best in these trying times and hope that my readers will help them by purchasing their DVDs.  Click here to order Humanity and Paper Balloons from Amazon.co.uk

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers (亀は意外と速く泳ぐ, 2005)

Suzume “Sparrow” Katagura (Juri Ueno of Swing Girls and Nodame Contabile) has an unusual turtle named Taro with a green and red painted shell as a pet. As far as pets go, turtles are not the most engaging of creatures. To make matters worse, when Suzume’s husband calls home from abroad he seems more interested in Taro the turtle’s welfare than in his wife.

Suzume’s life is much like that of the turtle: slow moving and mundane. This is in stark contrast to the life of her best friend Kujaku “Peacock” Ogitani (Yū Aoi of One Million Yen Girl and Hula Girls) whose life seems full of adventure and has big plans to move to Paris and live with a Frenchman in view of the Eiffel Tower. All that changes one day when Suzume is the unfortunate victim of an apple cart spilling its wares done the flight of 100 steps Suzume regularly must climb to get home. As she cowers on the steps to protect herself from the onslaught of apples, Suzume spots a tiny “Spies Wanted” poster on the railing.

Replying to the ad, Suzume meets the Kugitanis – an unusual couple who claim to be part of an important espionage operation. They test Suzume and pronounce that her ordinariness makes her the perfect candidate to be a spy. Thus begins Suzume’s spy training – a journey that gives her a sense of purpose in her life for the very first time. The irony in all this, of course, is in the fact that the Kugitanis' mission and employers are never made clear.

Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers (亀は意外と速く泳ぐ, 2005) is a quirky little comedy that will delight viewers who enjoy slow-paced, off-the-wall humour. Director Satoshi Miki’s choice of stylized sets and costumes are the big hint that this film should be read as a flight of fancy and not realism. Taro the painted turtle is quite literally a turtle whose shell has been painted red and green. The red and green motif repeats itself in Suzume’s costumes and in many elements of the set. It is a light film with a simple message: if one looks closely enough one can find the extraordinary in the ordinary.

I was particularly delighted with the opening credits of the film which were designed and animated by Tobira Oda. Suzume is flipping through a giant pad of paper with flip book illustrations in its corner. The flip book animation – which is interspersed with film credits – shows an animated version of Suzume performing the mundane daily tasks of a housewife: preparing meals, hanging laundry, cycling to run errands, vacuuming, and so on. A simple concept executed in a very cleverly way.

Order Turtles are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers Now

This month I will be featuring reviews of Japanese feature films released by independent distributors in the UK. I was saddened by the news (read more at VCinema) that one of the many victims of the riots this week in England was the Sony DADC warehouse in Enfield. One of the biggest distribution warehouses in the London area, it held the stock of more than a hundred independent record labels and film distributors. While insurance will cover the cost of the stock that went up in flames, with no current stock to sell many of these companies have been put into extremely difficult financial circumstances.

Third Window Films is the distributor for Turtles Are Surprisingly Fast Swimmers in the UK.  They have written a long piece about the fallout from the fire on Facebook.  Other Third Window Films titles that I recommend include Fine, Totally Fine (read my review) and Confessions of a Dog (read my review). Please support Third Window Films by ordering films that are currently in stock in their Amazon Store (also available to order as an import via Amazon in the US, France and Germany).  If you live in the UK you can rent many Third Window Film titles on Mubi.  UK residents can also support Third Window Films at the cinema by supporting the release of Lee Sang-il's  Villain (Akunin) on August 19th. Check out the official Facebook page for details.

Catherine Munroe Hotes 2011

To order to Japan:

Kame wa Igai to Hayaku Oyogu Deluxe Edition