A Last Note

An actress who has left the stage and recently lost her husband goes to her summer house. There she meets old friends and acquaintances; everyone who comes brings a story with them, and most often the news of a death. The house turns in this way into a place where the past is told over and over, and the woman is forced to see where her own life has arrived. The film presents growing old as neither a tragedy nor a consolation; it tells it as it is, and with some humour. The account takes death not as a distant subject but as something spoken of at the table. Haruko Sugimura and Nobuko Otowa appear in Kaneto Shindo’s hundred and ten minute Japanese film, completed in 1995.