• 山の音 (Sound of the Mountain)

1/16/21 (Sat)

Naruse’s bleak 1954 film about failed marriages, based on Kawabata’s novel. The film opens cheerfully as Kikuko (Hara Setsuko) greets her father-in-law Shingo (Yamamura So) on a walk, where they joke about sunflowers. But it’s all downhill from there in a story told essentially from the perspective of Shingo, whose son (Uehara Ken) openly despises his wife Kikuko and has a mistress on the side; whose daughter (Nakakita Chieko) has an abusive relation with her husband and has escaped to her family home with her two children; and who himself has a static relation with his wife (Nagaoka Teruko), who he married only because her prettier elder sister died. The only positive relationship here is between him and Kikuko, who always wears a smile and treats him with respect. He treasures his time with her, and she says that her joyful time with him is what makes her resist getting a divorce from her loveless husband.

However, Kikuko endures disparaging comments about her childlessness from both the other women of the household and is clearly dissatisfied. The father comes to realize that he is standing in the way of her happiness. He is accused not unjustly of treating her as a child, as symbolized by a Noh child-character mask that he becomes taken with. She reveals in the end that she had become pregnant but had an abortion, seeing no hope for a happy life for either the child or herself – nothing around her suggests that having children will end well, including the sister’s dismissive treatment of her own small daughter (e.g. “You can read that yourself, you don’t need me”). In a supremely beautiful final scene in Shinjuku Gyoen, the father and daughter-in-law agree sadly to part ways.

The lovely Kikuko would make the perfect wife, and it was hard to see her treated this way, especially since we basically drop into the story in the middle with no background on why Shuichi should be such a creep to this wonderful person. But it must be said that Kikuko’s misery comes largely from her own weakness. She allows Shuichi to walk all over her and can hardly be surprised when he takes advantage of that. That makes the movie frustrating. Shuichi was too unfeeling to be real, with not a single positive trait. He was like a stock character plucked from the Villain lineup.

The relation between the father and daughter-in-law, on the other hand, was moving. The father, playing a role usually associated with Golden Age actor Ryu Chishu, was clearly energized by the young woman, who filled his needs in a way that neither his practical wife nor unloving children could do. Their achingly understated parting scene, emotions kept carefully under the surface (if only just), was worth sitting through the entire film. That was the dark film’s saving grace, and at least left open the possibility of a future for Kikuko after leaving her hopeless marriage behind.

I was surprised at the muted reaction among the family when it is discovered that Kikuko has gotten an abortion, snuffing out her husband’s unborn child and in-laws’ grandchild. I would have thought there would be more shock, but the prevailing sense was irritation. It gave the impression that abortion was not necessarily a rarity in society at the time. The film’s grudging acceptance of infidelity, abortion and mental abuse (as elsewhere with suicide) seems to be taking the repressed emotion thing too far.

The acting was fine throughout, with Hara giving a performance of great subtlety. Her acting in the devastating final scene was a master class on its own. The film would not have been the same without her. Others were fine as well, including the secretary in Shuichi’s office and the brief but memorable scene with Shuichi’s mistress.

Inaccurate translations popped up from time to time. In one case, when the subject arises of the wife’s late elder sister (who the husband was initially supposed to have married), the wife says tartly, “How unfortunate [that she died]”, a subtle dig at her husband for his poor luck in having to settle for the lesser of the sisters. The subtitles render this as, “She was unlucky”, an expression of sympathy rather than sarcasm. Even allowing for the ambiguity of much Japanese dialogue, that is clearly wrong, changing the dynamic between the two characters. It makes me wonder about the translations in non-Japanese films.