Director Mikio Naruse never garnered the acclaim of Yasujirō Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, or Akira Kurosawa. The absence of a clearly legible “minimalism” (a reductive descriptor of Ozu’s style, for what it’s worth), elaborate long takes, and sweeping historical epics from his oeuvre hasn’t quite given Western cinephiles easy things to obsess over, nor have his elegant melodramas captured the imagination of the New Hollywood generation the way Kurosawa in particular has. Naruse’s work, his later period especially, is pitched somewhere between the cinema of Ozu and Douglas Sirk. Writing about Yearning, Naruse’s 1964 masterpiece, critic Dave Kehr described the filmmaker as “one of the cinema’s great poets of ordinary unhappiness,” a wonderful descriptor but one whose catch-all character undersells the cultural and class specificity of Naruse’s work. Yearning isn’t about “ordinary” unhappiness and it certainly isn’t about working-class unhappiness, as is regularly suggested, but rather about the specific unhappiness of the petit bourgeoisie amidst its own disappearance.
The film centers on Hideko Takamine’s (who, aside from her collaborations with Naruse, also regularly worked with another acclaimed though lesser-known director, Keisuke Kinoshita) Reiko, a war widow who has been running a grocery shop out of her deceased husband’s house for almost two decades. But, as we learn through the film’s overture, a newly-opened supermarket threatens the store’s existence by undercutting their prices — their eggs cost less than half of what they cost at Reiko’s store — and Reiko’s deceased husband’s sister is looking to modernize the store as well (i.e. turn into a supermarket), which would push Reiko out. Only Koji (Yūzō Kayama), her 25-year-old brother-in-law with a propensity for drunken brawling, takes her side, motivated by both his moral compass as well as romantic feelings for his brother’s widow. It’s this knot that animates the film, and it’s the kind of impossible premise that Naruse does so well. In fact, Kayama would star in the director’s most tragic love story, Scattered Clouds a.k.a. Two in the Shadow, just three years later, again playing a man in love with a widow. There, the repressed, stifled emotions and insurmountable circumstances of fate mirror the destroyed ambitions of the professional–managerial class characters.
Yearning, by contrast, concerns itself with the lower strata of the middle class, and the economic concerns are subsequently more existential. When Reiko finally decides to let her sister-in-law have her way, she is forced to return home to her family. Koji accompanies her on the journey, and it’s here where the promise of reciprocation comes within arm’s reach for him as Reiko, who has so far insisted her feelings were purely platonic, indicates romantic desires of her own, desires she won’t allow herself to act on, knowing that a relationship with her brother-in-law would cause a stir. There’s also the matter of Reiko’s loyalty toward her late husband. This is obviously as much of a social prison as it is an emotional one (they reinforce each other, really), something Naruse’s mise en scène, which moves between tight enclosures and TohoScope vistas, adds an additional layer to. Viewed from a certain perspective, the scenery that the film’s ultimate tragedy plays out against scans as something of a cruel joke — an uncharacteristic gesture from the open-hearted Naruse — with the setting suggesting a freedom that is kept perpetually out of his characters’ reach.
It’s Koji who struggles most against the constraints the world puts on him, but his acts of defiance, consisting mostly of drinking, gambling, and short-lived affairs, do nothing to alleviate his situation. On the contrary, his yearning, a reckless counterpart to Reiko’s more muted emotionality, is exactly what dooms him. It’s this ever-present yearning that gives the film its English title (the Japanese title, Midareru, translates to “Confused”), but it also extends beyond the realm of the romantic. Reiko and Koji don’t just yearn for each other but also for different circumstances, a world that could accommodate a life together, where “modernization” didn’t mean having to leave the things they held dear in the past. Creating these socio-emotional ecosystems is one of Naruse’s greatest strengths, and it serves him particularly well with Yearning. The eponymous emotion doesn’t just permeate every scene and every charged interaction — it’s remarkable how much of the characters’ histories are felt through even the simplest lines of dialogue — but it’s also the prison that Reiko and Koji trap themselves within. It’s a gilded cage of sorts, a perpetual state of in-betweenness that allows for immobility, a refusal to build a concrete future. What Naruse understands is that time and history presses on, but it’s the director’s ability to capture the moments where old and new, the inability to act and the courage to dream, intersect, and scrape against each other that makes Yearning so masterful.
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