One Wonderful Sunday

Yuzo and Masako meet on a Sunday. Between them they have thirty five yen. The war is over, Tokyo is in ruins and there is no work. They try to get through the day. They look at a house to rent; they go in and imagine, and leave when they hear the price. They go into a cake shop. They want tickets for a concert and the touts have bought them all. Yuzo despairs and turns angry. Masako does not give up. In the evening they go to an empty open air stage and he sets about conducting an orchestra that is not there. Akira Kurosawa directs. Isao Numasaki plays Yuzo and Chieko Nakakita plays Masako. It is a Japanese production, made in 1947. The narrative takes place within a single day and the events are kept small. In its best known scene Masako looks straight at the camera and asks the audience to applaud; the scene breaks the fourth wall. The scene did not have the effect hoped for in Japan, but houses abroad did applaud when it was shown. The matter it treats is postwar poverty; the film gives it not through statistics but through the price of a ticket. The narrative does not offer optimism as a resolution; Masako's hope does not put Yuzo right. Kurosawa was making small films about everyday life in this period. The ruined Tokyo was shot in real locations and the city is inside the narrative. Its limit is age; the narrative is simple, the pace low, and the emotional steering explicit. Who it is for: viewers who like early Kurosawa and postwar Japanese cinema. Who it is not for: it is small in scale, slow, and the ending unresolved.