Women's Ways

[Dan Sallitt]

Shot in 1955 as part of the three-episode portmanteau film THE KISS,
"Women's Ways" is the liveliest and most enjoyable of Naruse's short
subjects. Naruse's signature lead actors, Ken Uehara and Hideko
Takamine, star as a doctor and his wife who becomes jealous when she
reads the diary of her husband's impressionable nurse (Meiko Nakamura,
who was a child actor in Naruse's 1944's THIS HAPPY LIFE). But the
stars provide little more than a framing story for the film's real
subject, the combative courtship between the nurse and a local grocer
(Keiju Kobayashi), which is completely and successfully engineered by
the doctor's wife to neutralize her rival. The youngsters are
somewhat exaggerated comic figures who do not discard their character
defects in order to fall in love: the nurse has an idée fixe that a
grocer's wife must subsist on leftover vegetables, and the grocer's
dogged persistence as a suitor is a natural extension of his original
stubborn resistance to marriage. Both young lovers are unaware of
their own reversals of emotion and of how manipulable they are - and
yet they convey enough sincere feeling to make us aware that this
jerryrigged marriage is as authentic as any other. The doctor and his
wife assume center stage again in the film's last scenes to chew over
the story Jane Austen-style, though Naruse and his writers (Zenzo
Matsuyama, from a story by the well-known author Yôjirô Ishizaka, who
also supplied the source material for Naruse's SINCERITY) conclude
with a rather ordinary twist ending. Continuously playful (after an
uneventful opening, Takamine steps up to the camera - "I hope you
don't mind waiting" - but she turns out to be talking to a patient)
and not overly ambitious, "Women's Ways" is an exercise in character
observation that showcases Nakamura and Kobayashi's comic skills.