behind the mask
by
Douglas Messerli
Yoko
Mizuki (screenplay, based on the novel by Yasunari Kawabata), Mikio Naruse
(director) (山の音 Yama no Oto) (Sound of the
Mountain) / 1954
It
is somewhat surprising that a Japanese film—based on a novel by Nobel-Prize
winning Yasunari Kawabata— made in the early 1950s, seems almost ripped out of
the contemporary headlines. If Naruse’s film, in some respects, seems
superficially tame, almost slightly “embalmed,” as film-critic Keith Uhlich
describes it, some of those reactions emanate simply from the style: the
realist settings of the picture (Naruse filmed on sets built to look like
Kawabata’s own neighborhood) and his use of almost post-card-like vignettes,
each framed with a slightly slow fade-out that suggests a further sense of
nostalgia, as in Vincente Minelli’s Meet
Me in St. Louis.
Even more importantly, in this male-dominated Japanese cultural moment, the major figure of the film, Kikuko Ogata (Setsuko Hara), who has evidently replaced the maid in her in-law’s household, seems ecstatic as she goes about her daily duties of shopping, cooking, and cleaning while in near-servitude to her family. The slightly hidden incestuous-like relationship with her kind and caring father-in-law, Shingo Ogata (Sō Yamamura), also dampens some of the emotional resonance of the movie. How can this woman be so seemingly joyful in her situation, we can only ask?
Yet this is hardly a valentine to the
central Japanese values of the day. Shingo’s daughter Fusako (Chieko Nakakita)
soon returns home with her two children unhappy with her relationship with her
husband, and later, after returning to her marriage, escaping it once more to
live temporarily with others before again moving back in with her mother and father.
Fusako’s timid daughter seems emotionally scarred.
Even more disturbingly, Shingo’s main ally,
Kikuko—his wife is a rather sharp-tongued complainer, who noisily snores each
night—is equally unhappy in her own marriage to his son Shuuichi (Ken Uehara),
a kind of spoiled drunk (in a manner very similar to what has been ascribed to
the younger Supreme Court Judge, Brett Kavanaugh) who works for his father, and
is witnessed by the older man as meeting several nights each week with his
secretary. When he does return home, late most evenings, he is drunk and
dismissive of his wife, continually referring to her as childish and ignoring
any attempts she devotedly makes to please him.
What Naruse, working outside of many
Hollywood conventions, doesn’t reveal is that inside her emotions are, as Uhlich
characterizes them, “roiling and bubbling,” as if a volcano might lie within
the mountain of the title, emotions sensed by Shingo—particularly since he is
now confronted with his past disinterest in his daughter’s marriage—discovering
from the secretary that his son also has another extra-marital affair, this, it
is hinted, with a singer who has a lesbian relationship with her roommate, the
two of whom in their evenings with Shuuichi, alternate musical interludes, hinting
that they both share in his sexual activities. Welcome to the Kanagawa
Prefecture of the late 1940s!
Ultimately, Shingo attempts to visit his
son’s “other” lovers, but, at the last moment, refuses to encounter them. After
all, as a younger man, he too apparently had had affairs. This is, Kawabata and
Naruse remind us, a patriarchal society. Yet he is determined to protect his daughter-in-law
at all costs by, at least, keeping his son’s philandering quiet.
What he doesn’t know is that Kikuko is
aware of his husband’s sexual alliances and his alcoholic dalliances. The final
scene of this sad film takes place on a park path where Kikuko admits to Shingo
that she has had an abortion, unwilling to raise a son from the man who has
fallen out of love with her; and, perhaps, we suspect, afraid that the son
might be too much like his cruel father, a man clearly fascinated with and who
himself hides behind masks.
Only occasionally did Hollywood films
of this period attempt such intensive analyses of a family life that has fallen
apart. One must recall that Eugene O’Neill’s tragic family drama did not premiere
until 1956, in Sweden. This 1954 film, based on the novel serialized from 1949
to the year of the movie, deals with issues that might be seen as already
sympathetic with our current #MeToo movement and the continued debates of Roe
vs. Wade. Patriarchal society is deeply questioned, and, even though neither
father-in-law nor his son’s wife act on their emotions, they have a deeper love
and respect for one another than they do for the others by whom they are
surrounded; throughout he brings Kikuko home small presents of fish and flowers,
almost as if he might be courting her.
If Naruse’s film might appear, at first
sight, a little tame, by the time we reach the last frame that safe world has
been completely upended, and we are thrust into a world of different values. The
characters, in various ways, reveal what might be described in those days as
engaging in unnatural sex, struggles for dominance, and parental neglect. O’Neill’s
family seems almost Victorian given the goings-on in the Ogata family. It’s
little wonder that Naruse himself described this work as one of his favorites.
Los Angeles,
November 9, 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment