The Heart

In the last months of the Meiji era a well meaning student becomes friends with a married couple. But the relation between them is strangely tense; there is something unspoken between husband and wife, and it comes from an event in the past. The closer the student comes out of curiosity, the more the weight of that past passes to him as well. The film does not set the secret up as a puzzle; what it really tells is what it is like for a person to be left alone with his own past. That the closing of an era and a personal reckoning fall in the same place stands at the centre of the account. Masayuki Mori and Michiyo Aratama appear in Kon Ichikawa’s hundred and twenty minute Japanese film, completed in 1955.