When watching Japanese films of the thirties, fifties and early sixties (a bit of a hiatus for the war), I find myself constantly asking myself two questions. Why are Japanese films still for the most part so little known and how was it that the Japanese were able to produce fine films with such consistency over such a long period when one compares them particularly with the huge volume of junk churned out by the US film industry in order to produce a small corpus of good films?
Japan was by this time was the largest single country producing film in the world,, in itself a remarkable fact for a monolingual film industry relatively unreliant on exports. The Japanese were overtaken by India sometime in the seventies but that the Indian and European film industries should be, as they currently remain, the largest is completely unsurprising (they each produce something like 1000 films a year). Both are huge continents with cinema traditions that are multilingual with several different centres of production (the majority of Indian films are made in the various centers in South India not in Bombay) but of the monolingual traditions ((with films being made largely in one centre - Hollywood or Tokyo) ,only the US was really comparable but produced many fewer films in total as well as and many fewer of high quality.
This Kawashima film is a beautifully observed and at times very funny satire on the moral postwar Japan, an area in which Kawashima was something of a specialist. Certain key scenes - the moment when the family remember their time of poverty or the brother and sister's wild dance in the sunset, Wakao's surreal imagined "stair-walk" as she recounts her plans for the future - are unforgettable. Wakao' performance is often rightly praised but it is actually the eerily 'ordinary" performances of Yûnosuke Itô and Hisano Yamaoka as the parents that make this film so remarkable.
I have only seen two other films by him but both are excellent in very different ways. Suzaki Paradaisu: Akashingô (1956) is a more melancholy postwar study of a drifting couple while Bakumatsu taiyôden (1957) is a very funny period drama with comedian Frankie Sakkai which also has a sly contemporary relevance. Both are strongly recommended..Kawashima was a major influence on Shohei Imamura (who co-wrote Bakumatsu taiyôden) whose early comedies like Hateshinaki yokubô (1958) and Buta to gunkan (1961) cover rather similar territory. Also to be discoveerd for those who do not already know them.
