The Criterion Collection, as any cinephile knows, casts a wide net, and us critics lucky enough to land on the distributor’s media radar are never short of options for review material. Last month saw the release of a dramatic staple of classic Hollywood (Gilda), an effervescent Ernst Lubitsch comedy (Trouble in Paradise), an acerbic religious satire much ahead of its time (The Life of Brian), an existentialist New Hollywood actioner (Point Blank) and the first three films from the insightful African-American auteur John Singleton (Boyz in the Hood, Poetic Justice and Higher Learning).
All would have been, to varying degrees, delightful watches for a movie-obsessed scribbler. But did I go for any of those, almost all of which I’ve seen and admired? No: Instead, I dove headfirst into a six-movie, three-disc Blu-ray box set from a Japanese director of whom I was unfamiliar — at least as a filmmaker — who worked in the male-dominated 1950s and 1960s. This was clearly the right choice, as these films, constituting the entire directorial corpus of Kinuyo Tanaka (1909-1977), feel like a revelation that asserts her importance in the world-cinema canon.
As an actor, Tanaka appeared in 258 films, working from 1929 to 1976 for a who’s who of Japanese cinema giants: Kenji Mizoguchi, Akira Kurosawa, Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse and Kon Ichikawa, just for starters. In 1953, she became the second woman to work as a film director in Japan, and over the next nine years would complete five more features, all with women in prominent parts. (Kinuyo Tanaka Directs, Criterion Eclipse, $79.96 Blu-ray).
That first feature, Love Letter (1953), is a fairly straightforward melodrama whose margins ache with post-World World II anxieties. Reikichi (Masayuki Mori), a repatriated soldier, has been drifting aimlessly since the war. Jobless and surviving on the charity of his more confident brother, a dealer of secondhand books, Reikichi spends most of his mental energy pining for his lost love, Michiko (Yoshiko Kuga), whose abusive stepmother wouldn’t condone her marrying an enlisted man.
A chance meeting from an old friend at the naval academy leads Reikichi to an unexpected job opportunity: ghostwriting love letters from desperate women to the men — including American Gis — who abandoned them. It’s in this capacity that Michiko, in seeking the company’s service for a letter to one such American soldier, reenters Reikichi’s life, but her shame and his pride and wounded moralism prevent the reunification that both clearly desire.
A harrowing scene involving prostitutes harassing Michiko on the street adds late ripples to the story, and speaks to Tanaka’s compassion for the downtrodden women of her society — poorly educated and bereft of opportunities for self-actualization — that would flower in her later pictures. Hopeful but unresolved, Love Letter is ultimately a portrait of postwar malaise in which characters of both sexes confront a loss of innocence and a hardscrabble existence in the shadow of the A-bombs.
Her follow-up, The Moon Has Risen (1955), is significantly lighter on its feet, and is by all accounts a satisfying crowd-pleaser. It’s set in the estate of a widower (Chishu Ryu) who lives with his three adult daughters. The arrival of Shunsuke (Shuji Sano), a handsome radio technician and an old family friend, prompts the youngest of said daughters, the spirited and slightly mischievous Setsuko (Mie Kitahara), to conspire to couple him with her older sister, the reticent Ayako (Yoko Sugi), who is facing an arranged marriage with an unattractive bank executive. Once Setsuko satisfies her matchmaking acumen, the film shifts focus to her own romantic life, as she begins to develop feelings with the partner in crime of her good-natured schemes, who, like Reikichi in Love Letter, is facing economic uncertainty.
There’s an element of a Shakespearean comedy of errors in the plotting of The Moon Has Risen, with its secretly engineered moonlit rendezvous. But it also bears the humanist hallmarks of its screenwriter, Yasujiro Ozu, whose keen grasp of multiple generations of family dynamics is unparalleled in international filmdom. The Moon Has Risen can be frustratingly retrograde when it comes to women’s roles, particularly with a female director at the helm: Setsuko accepts her partner’s hand in marriage only if she fulfills traditional domestic roles, and she is told on multiple occasions to “always smile.” Though surely reflecting the social mores of Japanese women in the 1950s, Tanaka’s characterization of Setsuko can be feel antediluvian by today’s standards, if balanced by the consequential agency with which Setsuko moves the story’s mechanics forward.
Forever a Woman, released the same year as The Moon Has Risen, couldn’t be more different than the prior film’s midsummer night’s dreaminess. It is, on paper and often onscreen, a compendium of a woman’s suffering, on emotional and physical fronts. The protagonist is Fumiko (Yumeji Tsukioka), who initially lives in a homestead with two children and a callous, pill-addicted, and — this being a Tanaka film — economically stymied husband. When she catches him in an infidelity, Fumiko files for divorce while taking solace in the poetry she writes as part of a local literary club. But soon enough, the No. 1 champion of her work, who is also Fumiko’s longtime love interest, dies unexpectedly. Compounding her grief, Fumiko contracts incurable breast cancer, whose devastating journey through surgery and radiation, detailed with still-shocking frankness, constitutes some two-thirds of the film.
Based on the life of Japanese poet Fumiko Nakajo, Forever a Woman bravely confronts a condition as common in life as it is uncommon on celluloid, certainly pushing the censors as far as they would allow in suggesting her postoperative scars and generally deteriorating condition. She finds an unexpected partner in the form of a journalist who falls in love while telling her twinned story of poetic success and medical tribulations, allowing her much-needed moments of pleasure and joy.
But the film survives on the strength of its unflinching bleakness, aided by some of Tanaka’s most clear-eyed mises-en-scène of her young career: the way the bars on the window of her hospital room mirror that of a prison, or the canopy of splintering chiaroscuro that accompanies a nighttime walk to a building that turns out to be the morgue, a harbinger of her own fate. By no means an easy watch, Forever a Woman is the director’s fiercest statement of female suffering, defiance and transcendence.
The Wandering Princess, released five years later, finds Tanaka experimenting with yet another genre — the biographical war saga. Epic in every way but its running time, where it culminates in a lean and impactful 102 minutes, the film is adapted from the memoirs of Hiro Saga (Machiko Kyo), the Japanese daughter of a marquis, who accepts a marriage proposal from Pujie, the brother of the last monarch of China’s Qing dynasty. Pujie rules the ill-fated Manchukuo state in Manchuria, and his outreach to the daughter of traditional Japanese nobility is a move of politics more than love, to shore up support for Manchuria in the Japanese homeland.
For her part, Hiro Saga, nee Ryuko, would rather pursue art than marriage, and though she is given the illusion of autonomy in her decision, the pressures of two nations prove all but impossible to reject. She is to show China “the virtue of the Japanese woman.” Tanaka emphasizes her placelessness among her adopted culture, as she is caught between two worlds and in precarious positions — her husband’s brother initially takes her for a Japanese spy — even before the ravages of the Second World War reach her shores.
Truth be told, though Ryuko/Hiro serves as a witness to history, its particulars came across as convoluted to this Western viewer, who began the experience without much, if any, knowledge of Chinese puppet states or the Second Sino-Japanese War. But what is clear is the centrality of a woman’s sacrifice, a recurring theme in Tanaka’s cinema, and the absolute command and urgency of her filmmaking. The Wandering Princess was Tanaka’s first movie to be shot in color and CinemaScope, and her world-enveloping vision meets the expanded horizontality of the format. Lengthy tracking shots, sprawling mountainous vistas worthy of John Ford, and the imperial pageantry of the sets and costumes all contribute to Kimio Watanabe’s stunning cinematography.
In Tanaka’s penultimate film, Girls of the Night (1961), the director pivots styles once again, this time experimenting with a “social problem” film, the problem being the world’s oldest profession. Cut from the same cloth as Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame (1956), which was set in the twilight of Japan’s legalized red light districts, Girls of the Night is set in the aftermath of the passage of the country’s 1957 Prostitution Prevention Law, which shuttered the brothels and ordered sex workers to six-month stays in rehabilitative shelters, where they would learn “respectable” trades.
The story primarily follows Kuniko (Chisako Hara), a onetime woman of the night, and the smartest resident at the women’s shelter, whose attempts to reintegrate into society — first at a family-run grocer, then at a factory, and finally at a rose nursery — are met with varying degrees of resistance or outright punishment once her background is discovered. Reuniting with screenwriter Sumie Tanaka, who penned Forever a Woman, Girls of the Night is similarly unflinching in its depiction of the suffering that befalls its protagonist. Jettisoning all judgment toward Kuniko’s economic choices, it’s a film that knows where to place the blame. “Men, too, should be rehabilitated,” argues one of the women’s center’s frustrated tenants. Time and time again, Kuniko shoulders the burden of the hypocritical men who publicly shame her while privately desiring her.
If Girls of the Night doesn’t match the pathos of Forever a Woman or the nuances of The Wandering Princess, it’s largely because of its genre trappings, of which a degree of didacticism is baked into the script: It makes its points, then hammers them home. But as always, Tanaka displays a gifted command of visual language, this time working in black-and-white CinemaScope; she’s as skilled as any of her contemporaries at knowing when to cut, and when to lay into an extended two-shot for maximum discomfort.
Tanaka’s final film, Love Under the Crucifix (1962), covers similar thematic ground to The Wandering Princess — both are shot in color and CinemaScope — but set amid the repressive formalities of late-16th century Japan. Adapted from an award-winning novel, it follows Ogin (Ineko Arima), daughter of a tea ceremony master, who in typical Tanaka fashion is pressured into a marriage she doesn’t want, in this case to an influential wholesale merchant. But her heart lies with Ukon (Tatsuya Nakadai), a Christian daimyo she met as a teenager when both were studying tea service under her father.
The pairing might as well be between the Capulets and the Montagues. Attempts to separate Ogin and Ukon fail, and their long-belated consummation has tragic consequences, as Ukon is forced to flee Japan after the country begins prosecuting Christians, and Ogin, whose many premonitory references to her own great sacrifice are peppered throughout the script, is left with few options for survival.
Love Under the Crucifix has much to say about religious persecution, the cultural import of the tea ceremony and the nobility of martyrdom, all of which are specific to the era depicted. But what’s most striking are the similarities across time periods and genres in Tanaka’s short but substantial filmography, whether in the twilight of the Oda regime or a reformed red light district in the 1960s: the mirage of female agency, the proscribed docility of the Japanese housewife, the disregard for the inner lives of half the country’s population. In Love Under the Crucifix, for instance, Ogin describes herself as an “empty husk” during her loveless marriage.
But her will of iron ultimately wins the day, even if she won’t live to see another one. Real love, Tanaka seems to suggest, is more transcendent than the flesh. The ending of the movie, like so much of Tanaka’s work, is tragic and properly infuriating. But if hope springs eternal, the beyond is welcoming, tender and forgiving.