Review: The Munekata Sisters (1950)

Yasujiro Ozu (1903-1963) was a kind of uncommon administrators who appeared incapable of creating a really terrible movie. Granted, a large portion of his early profession within the Nineteen Twenties and ‘30s has been misplaced—swept away by the cataclysms that worn out an estimated 96% of Japanese silent cinema¹—so we’ve got no entry to Wife Lost (1928) and Magnificence’s Sorrows (1931), critically maligned movies that even their creator deemed substandard. However of Ozu’s many extant works, the bulk vary between truthful and glorious, with masterpieces (1949’s Late Spring, 1953’s Tokyo Story, 1958’s Equinox Flower, and so forth.) that rank with cinema’s most profound achievements. Even lesser efforts (1934’s A Mom Ought to Be Beloved, 1948’s A Hen within the Wind) function sufficient good moments and stable craftsmanship to warrant occasional viewings. Such can also be the case of the lesser-known The Munekata Sisters.²

Based mostly on the novel by Jiro Osaragi and launched in August 1950, The Munekata Sisters marked the primary of three cases the place Ozu directed for a studio apart from Shochiku.³ In spring three years earlier, workers at rival firm Toho turned pissed off with their labor union’s guidelines and inventive interferences, and thus shaped an alternate union to signify themselves. Referred to as the Society of the Flag of Ten, they had been allowed to work in a beforehand vacant set of soundstages and had been christened Toho Second Manufacturing Department. Alas, tensions between the Society and the earlier union continued, the previous finally breaking off to type a subsidiary known as Shin Toho (“New Toho”).⁴ Shin Toho initially acquired distribution and monetary backing from its dad or mum firm—in trade for twenty-five p.c of all income—however in March 1950 defected to function by itself. Their output included debut movies by up-and-comers like Kon Ichikawa in addition to freelance jobs from established moviemakers. Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Canine (1949) was one such movie, the Ozu image below dialogue being one other.

Making The Munekata Sisters proved considerably irritating for Ozu, because the entrance workplace not solely dictated casting however picked the supply materials.⁵ “To be frank, I discover it tough to make a movie out of a novel,” he recalled in a 1958 interview with Kinema Junpo journal. “You’re pressured into remodeling the creativeness of the creator, after which have to pick out somebody to play a job already created. Once I write, I at all times write with an actor in thoughts from the start, and this helps create the function within the movie.”⁶ Working from what he described as a “very heavy” script,⁷ he additionally discovered himself quarreling with star Kinuyo Tanaka, with whom he’d labored quite a few instances earlier than however who’d not too long ago returned from three months in Hollywood and consequently had new concepts relating to movie appearing. Ozu, accustomed to dictating performances all the way down to the tiniest motion (“You aren’t speculated to really feel, you might be speculated to do,” he as soon as advised an actress), was even overheard grumbling about his main girl.⁸ Nonetheless, he remembered the shoot being a simple one and addressed the story predicament by directing the “heavy” script “very calmly.”⁹

The Munekata Sisters begins with one of many titular siblings, Setsuko (Kinuyo Tanaka), visiting the previous capital of Kyoto, the place she learns her father (Chishu Ryu) is terminally unwell with abdomen most cancers. A really “conventional” Japanese girl, she spends a lot of her time touring town’s well-known temples—a lot to the boredom of her youthful, “fashionable” sister Mariko (Hideko Takamine). Infused with modern methods of considering, Mariko’s likewise pissed off with the trail her sibling’s chosen: Setsuko tolerates an unemployed husband, Mimura (So Yamamura), regardless of lasting love for Hiroshi (Ken Uehara), a person she knew earlier than the battle. Mimura learns of his spouse’s emotions, turns in opposition to each siblings, opposes Setsuko in search of monetary help from Hiroshi to save lots of her bar, and bodily strikes her after suggesting they divorce.

At this level, the movie goes comically off the rails. The husband’s subsequent loss of life of a coronary heart assault results in a nauseating denouement whereby his widow refuses to marry Hiroshi for worry of being haunted by the previous. (The subdued writing and appearing within the resultant breakup scene feels misplaced amid overheated melodrama.) However the issues start even earlier than that, with contrivances and the drained cliché of interrupted intimacy. On the verge of divorcing her husband, Setsuko rendezvouses with Hiroshi at an inn to debate the long run. The 2 are slowly leaning in for a kiss after they hear somebody entering into the room; as they step aside, Ichiro Saito’s music involves a halt, accentuating what’s already an awkwardly staged scene. Ozu professed all through his life to have been bored with romance,¹⁰ and nowhere is that this extra evident than right here. Extra issues stem from the daddy and his inconsequential sickness subplot: as written, his solely narrative operate is to proffer recommendation to his daughters.

Earlier than Act Three, nevertheless, The Munekata Sisters fares as a modest entry in Ozu’s oeuvre, thanks in nice half to Hideko Takamine. A serious star since age 5, Takamine appeared in over 100 photos as a baby—together with one directed by Ozu, 1933’s Tokyo Refrain—earlier than transferring to Toho in her adolescent years. Clinging to recognition after the battle, she’d been one of many founders of the Society of the Flag of Ten and thus accompanied them to Shin Toho. In The Munekata Sisters, Takamine performs a tomboy (“She seems to be like a woman however acts like a baby,” says her father) vulnerable to humorous tics (protruding her tongue, scrunching her face, describing others’ lives with a theatrical tone of faux-profundity). Most apparently, although, her character Mariko is a byproduct of occupation-era (learn: westernized) Japan, steadily at odds together with her sister, whom she deems “old style.”

At its core, The Munekata Sisters is concerning the conflict of existence between its two protagonists. Whereas Setsuko dons kimonos, Mariko struts about in Occidental clothes; whereas the previous’s content material roaming the temple of Kyoto, the latter’s happier in cosmopolitan cities akin to Kobe and Tokyo; Mariko enjoys being spoken to in English and, at one level, kicks her slippers at a displayed set of samurai armor, one thing her sister would by no means do. Within the film’s greatest scene, the siblings sq. off in opposition to one another and their respective methods of life. (“Issues which can be actually new by no means get previous. What does ‘new’ imply to you? Brief skirts? Trendy nail polish colour?” “You and I are completely completely different. We had been raised in numerous instances.”) The movie by no means chooses a facet, although the siblings’ father, whereas assuring Mariko to search out her manner, cautions her that “being fashion-conscious is boring.” By drama’s finish, the sisters stroll collectively by means of Kyoto, clinging to their world views—Setsuko nonetheless in kimono, Mariko nonetheless in western clothes.

Persevering with on the subject of modernization: The Munekata Sisters is retroactively enjoyable as a glimpse into the later years of Japan’s postwar occupation. Whereas no foreigners seem, their affect is plainly seen: an workplace constructing rife with English indicators for Time, Life, and Bible Home; a café with a Coca Cola signal prominently hung from the ceiling. Meantime, the characters reminisce concerning the battle and prewar years: a bartender character is a former pilot, and Mariko attended junior excessive in Manchuria, the Chinese language demographic infamously annexed by Japan in 1931.

And there’s a pleasure constant throughout all surviving Ozu works: the beautiful sense of design, the pure circulation of photos. Along with cinematographer Joji Ohara, the director will get inventive with climate, at one level staging an inside scene throughout a thunderstorm, reaching mild results by means of the shadow of raindrops streaming down home windows. Photos that little question look spectacular within the movie’s new restoration. I haven’t seen the print in query (it’s to make its debut on the 2023 Cannes Movie Pageant) however hope it will definitely makes its technique to dwelling media markets there and elsewhere. For even minor Ozu movies akin to this are well worth the consideration of significant movie lovers all over the world.

Works cited and additional studying:

1. Russell, Catherine. The Cinema of Naruse Mikio: Ladies and Japanese Modernity. Durham: Duke College Press, 2008, p. 52
2. A disclaimer on the movie’s title. Per a Japanese correspondent of mine, the correct pronunciation of the sisters’ surname is “Munakata.” Nonetheless, I not too long ago attended an Ozu exhibit on the Kanagawa Museum of Trendy Literature in Yokohama, Japan; and the plaque associated to supplies for the movie below dialogue spelled the English title as “The Munekata Sisters.” This seems to be the official English spelling per the movie’s copyright holders; and so, for the sake of illustration, that is the spelling I’ve used on this article.
3. The opposite two cases are 1959’s Floating Weeds, shot for Daiei, and 1961’s The Finish of Summer time, shot for the Toho subsidiary Takarazuka Eiga.
4. Anderson, Joseph L. and Donald Richie. The Japanese Movie: Artwork and Business (Expanded Version). Princeton: Princeton College Press, 1982, pp. 167-8
5. Bordwell, David. Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema. Princeton: Princeton College Press, 1988, pp. 311-2
6. Richie, Donald. Ozu: His Life and Movies. Berkeley: College of California Press, 1977, p. 236
7. Bordwell, p. 313
8. Richie, pp. 144; 236
9. Bordwell, p. 313
10. Richie, Donald. “The Later Movies of Yasujiro Ozu.” Movie Quarterly 13, no. 1. Autumn 1959, p. 21