Mikio Naruse and Hirokazu Kore-Eda

Following a recent screening of Hirokazu Kore-Eda's wonderful Still Walking at BAM, the director was asked the inevitable question of whether this family comedy-drama was influenced by the films of Ozu. While there is some similarity to Tokyo Story in the film's family gathering at a memorial service, along with some shots of passing trains, burning incense and the like, Kore-Eda replied that while he respects Ozu, he was much more influenced by the films of Mikio Naruse, whose characters he described as "sad and hopeless." Coincidentally, I had just rented the British Masters of Cinema DVD of Naruse's Flowing, which gave me the opportunity to compare these two directors' worldviews.

Kore-Eda said he based his script for Still Walking in large part on extensive conversations he and his sister had with their mother in the months before her death. There is obvious love and affection for this family, but also a clear-eyed look at the casual cruelties inflicted upon the surviving son, Ryota, who fails to live up to the expectations held for the idealized other son Junpei, who drowned 15 years earlier. There is also the shockingly callous revelation that the troubled, obese man whom Junpei saved from drowning has been invited to the annual memorial services in order for them to ridicule and belittle him, in effect to punish him for inadvertently being the cause of Junpei's death. The film takes place in the span of one day and night, except for a short coda several years later that shows the continuity of generations while subtly revealing changes in Ryota's life that were hinted at previously. The visual economy of this final sequence is extremely moving.

Naruse's great film Flowing depicts another sort of "sad and hopeless" family, the various residents of a geisha house fallen on hard times. The characters are constantly counting money or trying to collect old debts, all in an effort to keep this somewhat disreputable business afloat. Naruse regular Hideko Takamine is superb as the owner, and stalwart Mizoguchi heroine Kinuyo Tanaka is even better as the new maid. Takamine's daughter, who has seen too much of the pennypinching misery and drunkenness of these women, is determined to take a menial sewing job rather than follow in her mother's business. The documentary-like shots of the town and the river punctuate the drama with a contemplative, poetic refrain similar to, if less rigorous than, Ozu's famous "pillow" shots. I'm eager to catch up with the rest of the Masters of Cinema Naruse set, each of which has a visual essay by critics Kent Jones and Philip Lopate.