• おとうと (Her Brother)

8/9/21 (Mon)

Ichikawa Kon’s 1960 film. Sentimental schlock based on a novel by Koda Aya. Koda also wrote Flowing (流れる), the source for one of my all-time favorite films. No such luck here. Kishi Keiko plays a teenage daughter who, burdened with a whiny invalid stepmother (Tanaka Kinuyo) and disinterested father (Mori Masayuki), essentially has to take care of the household and her near-delinquent little brother (Kawaguchi Hiroshi). Through the course of the film, the useless brother is arrested for theft, nearly drowns himself in a boat (he can’t swim), kills a horse (apparently he can’t ride either) and racks up debt at a pool hall among other antics, all of which the sister has to bail him out of even as she cooks and cleans and works. The stepmother, a devout Christian who doesn’t seem to make much effort to fit in the family, wants to punish the son, but the aloof father, a busy and respected writer, shrugs it off as a young boy’s passing phase and simply pays out to get the kid out of trouble and out of his hair. The angelic Kishi, presumably worried about the brother, resists efforts by the stepmother to pair her up with eligible beaus in a tiresome self-sacrifice. The sappy story did nothing for me, and I didn’t believe a word of it.

Ichikawa’s direction is plodding and uses some strange camera angles, like the view from the ceiling when the mother is praying that achieves the unique feat of making the great Tanaka look amateurish. Neither Kishi nor Kawaguchi has the acting chops to lift his/her character out of stereotype, and they were way too old for their parts (though their brawl was well done). The final hospital scene where Kawaguchi is dying of TB is almost comical in its melodramatic seriousness, especially when the sister ties her arm to her brother with a ribbon, linking them physically as well as emotionally. Yuck. It was like a silent film with sound. The film had an interesting washed-out look designed by cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, but it would have been more effective in any case in black and white. The film has little to offer. Yamada Yoji remade it a few years back, but I can’t imagine why.