Mikio Naruse’s Women, and a World That Betrays Them, at BAMPFA

The title of the stunning BAMPFA retrospective Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman, continuing through Dec. 21, neatly captures the artistic and pragmatic duality of the great 20th century Japanese director. In a career that spanned four decades and 89 films, Naruse refined his unflinching perspective on the plight of women while meeting the bottom-line demands of his studio bosses.

It’s fascinating to revisit Naruse’s films, especially the haunting landmarks Floating Clouds and Yearning, from a post-post-feminist perspective. The director mostly worked in the shomin-geki genre — set among the lower middle classes — where women, in particular, struggled with limited economic opportunities (if they weren’t “fortunate” enough to marry a well-off man).

A fatalist by nature, Naruse (1905-69) didn’t soft-soap his female characters’ endless sacrifices and thwarted dreams with dime-store hope and sentimentality. And yet while his movies depict the ritualistic inflexibility of pre-war Japanese society, and the postwar cracks and corruption that unmoored the system (with the loss of a generation of young men complicating women’s plans and prospects), Naruse’s women are persistently proactive in the face of every obstacle and constraint.

Late in his career, which wrapped in 1967, Naruse said of his characters, “If they move even a little, they quickly hit the wall. From the youngest age, I have thought that the world we live in betrays us; this thought still remains with me.”

Melodrama often entails tragedy, but Nakuse-style shomin-geki is worlds away from, say, the nihilistic doom of film noir. His female protagonists are generally moral, sincere and direct, not to mention valiant. Determined to gain a small measure of happiness, they don’t give up. The stakes are great; respect must be paid.

A contemporary of pantheon directors Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujirō Ozu, Naruse used every filmmaking technique in the book when he finally got his shot at the director’s chair in 1930 after a decade as a prop man and set assistant. He gradually abandoned his experimentalism as the Silent Era gave way to the talkies and the ’30s became the ’40s, opting for a classical visual language that situated his characters in their domestic settings and highlighted their emotional lives.

Naruse’s essential 1955 film Floating Clouds (screening July 16 and Sept. 14) employs enough exterior shots to convey the destruction and shock of Japan’s defeat in WWII, and to create a dismal contrast with the sun-dappled Indochina woods where Forestry Service newbie Yukiko (frequent Naruse star Hideko Takamine) had a wartime affair with her married older boss Kengo (Masayuki Mori). As Yukiko seeks to create a postwar life amid the ruins with her manipulative, self-pitying flame, the timelessly profound drama unfolds mostly indoors, in various homes, bars and inns that, paradoxically, provide no refuge for the erstwhile lovers.

A year later, Takamine played a slightly less desperate character in the mesmerizing women-in-the-workplace saga Flowing (July 19 and Sept. 12). The office space, ahem, is a waning geisha house; cash-strapped proprietor Otsuta (Isuzu Yamada) is holding on amid changing times while daughter Katsuyo (Takamine) tries to plot a future involving neither the family business nor a husband.

Takamine is a sublime actress, able to communicate to the audience with her face and the smallest movement the opposite of whatever her character has just said. Naruse’s 1964 masterpiece Yearning (Aug. 15 and Sept. 21) centers her as Reiko, the hardworking, late-30s proprietor of a family grocery store. Reiko was married to the family’s oldest son for all of six months before he was killed in the war, and she has remained a widow all these years.

Her status in the family, her sweat equity in the store and her identity are all jeopardized by the supermarkets that have invaded her Tokyo suburb. The other factor upsetting the longstanding status quo is her ne’er-do-well brother-in-law, Koji (Yuzo Kayama, doing a credible Montgomery Clift), who was a young boy when Reiko came into his world.

Filmed in glorious widescreen black-and-white, Yearning is fantastic from start to finish. Reiko has mastered the art of self-sacrifice, up to a specific point: she bends but does not break. That’s a necessary quality when even those who love you, and want to help, don’t come through in a pinch.

For the women in Mikio Naruse’s world, even the limited opportunities come with strings attached. This is a distressing view of the world, but Naruse doesn’t leave the viewer hopeless. His judgment-free outlook and unfailing empathy provide the outline for a kinder society. He stands with the other great humanists of the cinema, Jean Renoir and especially Satyajit Ray, as a chronicler of our grace and dignity as well as our cruelty and selfishness.

‘Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman’ runs through Dec. 21 at BAMPFA in Berkeley. Details here.