Repast

Michiyo lives in a flat in Osaka; her husband Hatsunosuke works at a brokerage and comes home tired. Every day is the same: cooking, cleaning, shopping, and conversations that get no answer. His niece runs away from Tokyo and arrives at their door, and the girl upsets the balance of the house. One day Michiyo packs and goes back to her mother in Tokyo. Mikio Naruse directs. Setsuko Hara plays Michiyo and Ken Uehara plays Hatsunosuke. The source is an unfinished novel by Fumiko Hayashi, who died before completing it. Naruse and Hayashi were joined in six films and this is the first; both describe the economic confinement of women from the same place. The subject is money rather than marriage. Whether Michiyo can leave depends directly on how she would live; the question of how a woman survives alone in Tokyo is at the centre and the film gives no easy answer. Setsuko Hara was known at the time for the good natured daughters of Ozu's films; here she plays a tired, angry, broken woman. The narrative builds no large event. There is no fight, no infidelity, no crisis; the matter is daily life itself and what repetition wears away. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese family drama and the cinema of Naruse. Who it is not for: little happens, the pace is very slow, and the ending returns to the social template of its period.