• 夜ごとの夢 (Every-Night Dreams)

8/10/24 (Fri)

Naruse’s 1933 melodrama, one of his final silent films, already picks up on his much-visited theme of a woman forced to support herself due to weak or duplicitous men. Here, it is the former. The apparently unmarried Omitsu has been supporting her young son working in the not-so-respectable profession of bar hostess, though she limits herself strictly to entertaining in the bar. She is popular and clearly knows how to handle men; the opening scene shows her bumming a cigarette off two admirers, one who has only a cigarette but no match and the other vice versa. She has an offer of financial support from a sleazy customer, but she adeptly keeps him at arm’s length.

An unexpected visitor to her home proves to be her husband, a jobless and self-pitying loser who skipped out on her three years earlier due to his shame at not being able to provide for his family. She tells him without a second’s thought to get lost, but his pleas for another chance lead her reluctantly to give in. He proves to be a loving father to the child, but remains unable to find work due to the perception, largely correct, that he is too wimpy to handle it. When the son is hit by a car – not unexpectedly; kids in Japanese films are prone to disease and accidents – the desperate father steals money from a business to get the needed money. His wife is horrified that he would stoop so low. She orders him to turn himself into the police, saying that they can start over once he is free again. Depressed at his own impotence, he writes her a final note and drowns himself. When she hears the news, her surprising reaction is to rip apart not only the suicide note but her late husband as well as a spineless coward. She tells her recovering child to grow up to be a stronger person.

The movie is as slight in story as in length (just over an hour) but manages to create a credible situation and characters, especially the no-nonsense bar hostess and enervated husband. The wife has been hardened by life, and her startling response to her husband’s death, if brutal, is completely in character. Naruse has some interesting ideas, like showing the toy car rolling over the table followed by children running to report that the boy has been run over. The scenes in the bar featuring the women with their various patrons were enjoyable, and the glimpses of the sea nicely foreshadowed the man’s fate.

The one big problem was the overreliance on dialogue title cards to tell the story. That’s a problem with the script by the estimable Ikeda Tadao, who was behind several of Ozu’s great silent films among others; this work is not even listed in his Wikipedia page. Still, Naruse should and could have made those unnecessary. It did make me think that this could be remade as a talkie.

Kurishima Sumiko, known as Japan’s first female movie star, was at the peak of her powers here, just a few years before her retirement (reappearing only briefly many years later in Naruse’s masterwork Flowing). She was pitch perfect as the determined bar hostess. Ozu veteran Saito Tatsuo was compelling as the feeble husband with a slight stoop and sad-sack eyes. Other familiar names included Sakamoto Takeshi as the customer who thinks money will win over the bar hostess and Iida Choko as the bar proprietress.