Mother

When film buffs list the great masters of Japanese cinema, a handful of obvious choices, such as Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, and Kenji Mizoguchi are sure to be included. But many film historians contend that such a list is incomplete without Mikio Naruse, whose quiet, contemplative, often resoundingly downbeat pictures have been sadly under-valued over the years. In fact, many of Naruse's most moving works, including the touching family drama, Mother (1952), are currently not even available on DVD in most parts of the world.

Mother is told from the perspective of a child, and there's good reason for that -- Yoko Mizuki's screenplay was based on the winning entry in a national essay contest for Japanese schoolchildren. Naruse follows the small triumphs and larger tragedies of the Fukuhara family, as they deal with illness and loss of hope in hard economic times. The mother of the title (played, quite movingly, by Kinuyo Tanaka) has no choice but to take over the family dry cleaning business when her husband passes away, but, even while dealing with her defiant teenage daughter (Kyoko Kagawa), she manages to experience the joy of watching her family reach hard-won maturity.

"This is the type of project I understand best," Naruse once said when asked about the storyline of Mother. The picture is one of many Naruse would make that centers on a lower-class character's struggle to survive with dignity, a topic that the director certainly knew a thing or two about. Naruse's father was an impoverished embroiderer in the early 1900s who died when Naruse was just a teenager. After his father's death, Naruse moved through a series of menial, demeaning jobs before becoming a prop man at Japan's Kamat Studios, where he soon flourished.

The Japanese film industry wasn't strictly ruled by a class system, so Naruse was able to climb his way up through the ranks solely on the basis of performance, and he worked with great diligence to become a director. Nothing was handed to this unassuming yet passionate artist who never forgot the struggles of his youth, and examined them in a series of films that deserve to be better known than they are as of this writing. If you think you've experienced all the key works of Japanese cinema, surely Mother will be a revelation.

Producer: Ichiro Nagashima
Director: Mikio Naruse
Screenplay: Yôko Mizuki
Cinematography: Hiroshi Suzuki
Music: Ichirô Saitô
Film Editing: Hidetoshi Kasama
Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka (Masako Fukuhara), Kyôko Kagawa (Toshiko Fukuhara), Eiji Okada (Shinjiro), Akihiko Katayama (Susumu Fukuhara), Daisuke Katô (Uncle Kimura), Yônosuke Toba (Naosuke Fukuhara), Masao Mishima (Ryousuke Fukuhara), Chieko Nakakita (Aunt Noriko).
BW-98m.

by Paul Tatara