Haha wa shinazu

A rather pedestrian movie from a master director, Mother Never Dies is neither terrible, nor terribly good. The movie is about a married couple and their son and travails over a number of years. It starts just before the beginning of the Depression, when the father gets laid off from his job. While he struggles to feed the family and find another job, the son has to adjust to being in a lower income bracket. Meanwhile, the mother develops this worrying pain in her stomach... The first half of the story has a gentle optimism (despite its potentially depressing subject matter) but as the timeline of the movie approaches the Pacific War (against the Chinese "aggressors" as they're called in the movie) the movie's theme of the need to suppress individuality to become a better Japanese comes to the foreground. Not as offensive or didactic as propaganda movies can be, Mother Never Dies is ultimately just a somewhat dull family drama.

Takako Irie loses his job, and he, his wife and son movie to a poor neighborhood. While he resolutely works his way back into respectability, his wife grows ill; to avoid being a burden, she kills herself, leaving a note urging her widower and child to make the youngster into a great man, a good Japanese man. As Irie doggedly advances, he grows more humble; the son, however, forgets the message, even as he remembers his mother's love,and grows a sense of entitlement.

Takako Irie gives a stellar performance here, increasingly burdened under old-man prostheses, and makes Mikio Naruse's sentimental movie work. However, examining it almost eighty years later, we can see the wartime propaganda, as when unprovoked Chinese forces fire on a Japanese unit, and the the nation takes up arms in an expression of the best of the Japanese character. Was this drawn from Sensuke Kawauchi's novel, or was it something added for the zeitgeist... or at the censors' insistence?