To Western viewers, Japanese cinema offers a still largely unexplored history, of which we have not finished going back. Proof of this is two late and unreleased films by Mikio Naruse (1905-1969), Latest chrysanthemums (1954) and As autumn approaches (1960), surface in repertory rooms and complete the knowledge we had of this floating and mysterious filmmaker.
Naruse was a silversmith of impressions, a climatic painter of affects, knowing how to grasp by small touches, never frontally, how existence allows itself to be undermined by secret pains and drunken shames, those which can be read in the gaze or the silence of others. . Attached to everyday life, his art, of exemplary restraint, drained a deep, inconsolable melancholy, like the deposit left in the heart by the simple passage of time.
Childhood movie
The two works are among those, numerous at the time, which evoke the difficult living conditions of broken families in post-war Japan, between deprivation and sacrifice. They have above all a common decor, the “shitamachi”, district of the plain of Tokyo, whose name means “lower town”, inhabited at the time by the popular classes and of picturesque appearance, having aroused a whole cinematographic vein. .
As autumn approaches is, moreover, a film of childhood, a rare thing in Naruse. Hideo (Kenzaburo Osawa) arrives in Tokyo with his mother, Shigeko (Nobuko Otowa), widowed and destitute. She entrusts her son to the care of her grocer uncle while she goes to work as a hostess in a pleasure house. Infamous task that reflects on Hideo, looked aside by his host family, mocked by the kids in the neighborhood. The child becomes friends with little Junko, another hostess daughter, who takes him for walks on bridges or on the roofs of shopping centers.
Begun in a light tone, the film turns into drama surreptitiously. Naruse approaches through his young hero a feeling of disaffiliation: this radiant zone where love merges with shame, where attachment feels followed by the possibility of abandonment. During a magnificent passage, Hideo and Junko flee towards the seaside, but find only vacant lots and areas under construction. They are then the little cousins of the wandering kids of Italian neorealism or of Antoine Doinel of Four Cents Coups: let’s reject a modernity that does not want them and does not promise them anything.
Female maturity
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