• 晩菊 (Late Chrysanthemums)

12/4/20 (Fri)

Naruse’s 1954 adaptation of several short stories by Hayashi Fumiko about former geisha trying to make their way in the postwar world. He ties them together by making them all hail from the same former geisha house. Nobu (Sawamura Sadako), the only one currently married, runs a struggling bar with her henpecked husband where the women often hang out. The widowed Tamae (Hosokawa Chikako) works as a cleaner at a small hotel but is constantly sick from weariness. She lives with Tomi (Mochizuki Yuko, great), also a widow and a feisty type whose main occupation seems to be drinking and gambling. All owe money to their ex-colleague Kin (a flawlessly cast Sugimura Haruko), who alone is financially secure thanks to a long obsession with money and an eye for real estate. She seems to delight in making the rounds and collecting rent and other debt from her fraught friends, who humor her to her face (they’re former geisha, after all) but cut her down behind her back (ditto).

Tamae and Tomi both have children who go off and leave them, as children will do: Tomi warns her daughter in vain not to elope as threatened and repeat the mother’s mistake, while Tamae is unhappy that her son, who helps provide for her, has taken a job in faraway Hokkaido. (I love Tamae’s Jewish-mother exchange with her son as she sees him off in the train station, something like: “Don’t worry about me. I often think of dying, but if anything should happen, don’t go to any trouble to come back.”)

Kin has never married and appears unfeeling at first. She tells her real estate agent (Kato Daisuke) to throw the remaining tenant out of a house she wants to sell (“Men tend to be soft on a widow”), and her talk with her old friends is hardly warm. She boasts that she has no husband or children to hold her down, almost as if accusing her friends. We gradually come to understand her, though. Back in Manchuria, she had a lover Seki (Miake Bontaro) who tried to drag her unwillingly into a double suicide, for which he was arrested. He is now out of prison and has come crawling timidly back for money, which she flatly rejects. She is excited to hear from a handsome ex-suitor (Uehara Ken), whose photo she has kept all these years. She is crushed to discover that he is no longer an exciting young man with infinite possibilities but a poor and worn-down salaried worker, coming to her not for love but also for money. She throws him out as well, burns his photo (a lovely scene), and retreats into her real estate deals. She unexpectedly becomes a sympathetic figure.

The film has been called bleak, but I didn’t get that impression. There’s a sense, as usual in Naruse, that the women will persevere somehow. The spirited Tomi in particular seems capable of handling whatever life throws at her, a big help to the weaker Tamae. The two are down after seeing the latter’s son off and reminiscing about their past, but their final image is laughter as they try to imitate a young girl swinging her hips in Marilyn Monroe style. Meanwhile, Kin is seen fumbling for her ticket at a station, then following the agent on another real estate deal. She is clearly a survivor. The world is presented as it is, and while life is certainly not easy for single women, it seems no easier for the two men who reappear in Kin’s life or the married couple running the bar. We all do what we have to in order to stay alive, and it was the women’s laughter at the end that stays with us.

Sugimura was playing the well established Sugimura role, which she does to perfection. Her portrayal of the no-nonsense Kin is unsparing, never seeking false empathy. As the debt collector for all the geisha, she is basically the character tying the plot strands together. Her burning of the photo was an enlightening moment. Among the rest, Mochizuki was my favorite as the lively Tomi, but all the geisha were excellent. Miake was memorable in his brief scene as Kin’s pitiful ex-lover and would-be murderer.

The production is spare and matter-of-fact with no special flourishes, showing only what is necessary for the plot. The one stumble was Kin’s internal monologue explaining her disappointment with the ex-suitor. The information should have come out in the dialogue or other action; her feelings were anyway fairly clear. Still, the film otherwise doesn’t take a wrong step. Chrysanthemums represent autumn in Japan, which seems an apt metaphor here. One of Naruse’s best.