Mikio Naruse's Yearning

Last week Asia Society screened Mikio Naruse's late masterpiece, Yearning, to a completely sold-out house. I was 15 minutes late to the screening and had to stand in the back the entire time, but I never considered leaving. The film's raw emotional power had a cumulative effect, building through a 3-act structure to one of the most devastating finales in all of cinema. Keith Uhlich in Slant Magazine describes the film well in his 2006 review from the time of Film Forum's massive Naruse retrospective.

Naruse's great lead actress, Hideko Takamine (an icon for Naruse comparable to Kinuyo Tanaka for Mizoguchi and Setsuko Hara for Ozu) plays Reiko, whose life has been built on self-denial ever since her husband's death in the war 18 years earlier. She is trying to run a small family grocery store whose days are numbered as a new supermarket chain threatens to destroy the business. Her much younger brother-in-law, Koji, has been living a dissolute life of drinking and sleeping around when he suddenly confesses to Reiko that he has loved her all these years. Her slavish devotion to her late husband's memory makes her instinctively reject this new reality. She is of course simultaneously attracted and repelled by Koji's attentions. The husband's framed photo recurs constantly in the background of several shots, and becomes a sort of fetish object in her suitcase when Reiko finally packs up and tries to escape.

At this point the heartbreaking final act begins as Reiko boards a train to flee to her distant hometown. This might serve as the end of a late Ozu film, with the resigned departure on the train and acceptance of her lonely fate. But Naruse ups the emotional ante, as Koji follows Reiko onto the train and they begin a flirtatious courtship during the long journey. Once they stop for the night, however, Reiko rejects Koji again, leading inevitably to tragedy. Reiko has placed a paper ring on Koji's finger, a symbol and portent of the fragile nature of their bond. Koji slips away and when Reiko wakes in the morning, she looks outside and sees the paper ring identifying his dead body. She runs after him but fails to catch up as stretcher-bearers carry him away.

Keith Uhlich aptly describes this shattering ending: "This brings us full-circle to Reiko's final close-up, about which pages should be written though such extended analysis will not be attempted here. Suffice to say that it is one of the cinema's most primal images, a silent scream of recognition and understanding by way of soul-crushing regret, one that forever hangs, like a masterpiece of portraiture, within its own timeless space, waiting to be looked upon so that it may gaze back, alternately, in horror and in revelation."

UPDATE: I've added a couple new photos, in their proper Tohoscope ratio.