Even Parting Is Enjoyable

[Dan Sallitt]

A celebration of the creative renewal of Toho in 1947, the portmanteau
film FOUR LOVE STORIES included episodes by Naruse, Shiro Toyoda,
Teinosuke Kinugasa and Kajiro Yamamoto. Naruse's episode, the second,
written by Hideo Oguni, is a leisurely dramatic piece about the
breakup of a bar girl (Michiyo Kogure, the star of OKUNI AND GOHEI)
and a gangster (Isao Numasaki), mostly staged in the woman's
apartment. As economical as a typical TV production of the time, the
episode contains only one other location, a bar where a group of
predatory characters lie in wait for the bar girl to become
available. These marginal figures acquire some edge from Naruse's
usual misanthropic detailing, but the romantic story, driven by
maudlin music, gradually becomes lugubrious after a few feints at
lowlife humor, and is one of the few instances of Naruse's direction
being difficult to detect. The structure of the episode, in which
introductory material is kept to a minimum in order to arrive quickly
at the juicy dramatic scenes, is not uncommon for commercial short
subjects of the time, but it deprives Naruse of the opportunity to
play with narrative development. And one suspects that sentimental
love scenes, even if they end badly, don't interest him very much.