Both You and I

[Dan Sallitt]

I went into this 1946 movie with zero expectations – Catherine Russell
called it a companion piece to the straitjacketed A DESCENDANT OF
URASHIMA TARO, possibly my least favorite Naruse film – and in that
frame of mind I rather enjoyed myself. Like URASHIMA TARO, BOTH YOU
AND I is designed as social propaganda: in this case, to encourage
postwar Japanese workers to be less deferential to the authority of
their employers. But whoever came up with this mission (the American
occupation forces? If so, why all the railing at capitalists?) seems
not to have cared much about how Naruse executed it. Featuring the
famous manzai comedy team Entatsu Yokoyama (the barber in Naruse’s
1944 THIS HAPPY LIFE) and Achako Hanabishi, BOTH YOU AND I is little
more than a series of comedy sketches, not often funny but made
endearing by writer/director Naruse’s winking refusal to pull the plot
together or cover up the contrivance of the casting. (“If you
consider how much it would cost to hire a couple of comedians, they're
cheap,” says the duo’s boss after making them perform at one of his
parties.) Between the sketches, Naruse inserts disconnected bits of
droll character business: one of the comedians falling abruptly asleep
at the dinner table; the other oblivious of the ages of his
marriageable daughters; unruly youngsters somersaulting threateningly
in living rooms. For a while, the film’s tendentious passages are
comically tucked away in the dialogue of a play being rehearsed by one
of the comedians’ children; when the message eventually invades the
plot line, it is pounded home so monotonously that the film nearly
sinks. But the comedians manage to pull out their only really funny
routine for the climactic telling-the-boss-off scene, which sugarcoats
the pill of the sloganeering. I wouldn’t exactly call BOTH YOU AND I
a good film, but its desultory freedom of expression lifts it above
most of Naruse’s work from the relatively dry 1946-1950 period.