• 安城家の舞踏会 (The Ball at Anjo House)

10/27/19 (Sun)

Having recently seen the fun An Osaka Tale, I wanted to check out more of director Yoshimura Kozaburo’s work, and this was an obvious first stop. It is often held to be one of the finest of all Japanese films of the 1940s.

The 1947 film is a Chekhovian portrait of an aristocratic family unwilling to face their decline in postwar society. This is not a traditional Japanese household: it is a formerly titled family living in a palatial Western-style home with a father who studied painting in Paris, a son who plays classical piano and a daughter who (at least in the course of the film) wears only Western clothing. The family appears to have lived in the past mainly off its inherited wealth and property. But times have changed: it survived the war by borrowing money from a slimy businessman who profited in the munitions trade by using the family name, and is now facing collapse in the wake of land reforms, the abolition of the aristocracy and new taxes enforced by the Occupation government (still in power when the movie was made). The complex story has several strands:

• The father, unable to repay the loans, clings to the hope that the businessman will allow him at least to keep the family home in recognition of the favors that the father had provided. The businessman, now even richer from his dealings in the black market, no longer needs the prestige of a title and laughs the father off. He says he will eject the family from the home the next day and, driving the nail in deeper, breaks off the marriage between his daughter and the man’s son. The father, feeling deeply betrayed, falls into despair.
• The family’s former chauffeur, who harbors a secret longing for the eldest daughter Akiko, has done well in business and wants to use the money he’s saved to rescue the household, hoping to win over Akiko in the process. Akiko, however, unable to accept their reversed circumstances, refuses even to be in the same room with him.
• The sardonic son sees no point in resisting the forces that be and, rather than look for a job, has fallen into a dissolute life. He casually dumps a maid he had lured with a false promise of marriage in order to hook up with the wealthy businessman’s daughter. He responds with equal callousness to the latter when he learns that her father intends to reject their engagement.
• The younger daughter Atsuko is the family’s saving grace, the only one willing to fight for a future. She pushes the family to cast off its patrician mindset and accept the ex-chauffeur’s offer rather than bow and scrape before the ruthless businessman. She wants them to hold their heads high and embrace the new world as best they can.

The family, resigned to ruin, decides to hold a final ball as a swan song to a soon-to-be lost world. As the guests show up in their evening gowns and kimono and dance to the small orchestra, the various strands of the plot interweave, and all the themes come together in a night of betrayal, outrage, humiliation, nostalgia for a phantom past, and threats of murder, suicide, rape and other unpleasantries.

The film is underpinned by Atsuko’s drive and optimism, a message for postwar Japan to move forward rather than cling to impossible dreams of things past. When the plebeian ex-chauffeur drunkenly knocks over a suit of armor – a perfect metaphor of the dizzying changes in the societal order – Atsuko purposefully tells the servants to leave it be. It is Atsuko who welcomes the ex-chauffeur as an equal, averts impulsive and dangerous actions by family members, ignores social indignation by summoning the father’s mistress to the ball to ensure his happiness, and finally secures the means to see off the greedy businessman and rescue the home. After further saving her father from a tragic decision, she dances a tango with him at the film’s end in an exquisite moment mixing a gentle farewell to the past with hope for the future.

There are great performances all around, including Takizawa Osamu, a young Mori Masayuki and Aizome Yumeko as the father, son and elder daughter, but the indisputable star is a luminous Hara Setsuko as Atsuko. She is the embodiment of her character as the symbol of a pragmatic acceptance of reality and a determination to look forward.

The direction by Yoshimura is unspectacular or less, especially the haphazard treatment of the ball (Visconti used the same idea much more powerfully years later in The Leopard) and the attempted suicide scene. Some melodramatic scenes will be hard for modern audiences to take seriously. He does smartly keep the action almost entirely indoors and manages a deft balance among the storylines and characters. He is said to have come up with the idea for the film upon attending a final ball at an established household before its dispersal, which set his imagination running, and at least some of the events in the film are reportedly based on that evening. So we have him to thank for that. Still, the movie’s real strengths are the compelling book by Shindo Kaneto (later himself a noted film director), which created believable characters with clear motivations, and the wonderful acting. These make the film very much worth seeing.