This Happy Life

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Dan Sallitt

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Aug 19, 2010, 1:19:22 AM8/19/10
to NaruseRetro, meke...@kerpan.com
I'm glad there isn't anything else like this bizarre movie in Naruse's
filmography, but it's a whole lot more appealing and graceful than it
has any right to be. Made as the end of World War II approached, THIS
HAPPY LIFE is pure wartime propaganda, but of an unusual sort.
There's little militarist feeling expressed, apart from a kenbu sword
dance performed by a young boy; rather, the film's mission is to
instruct the home front, in great detail, on how to make do with the
odd scraps of food and supplies available, and to demonstrate in
various ways that people can be happy no matter what straitened
circumstances they find themselves in. The setting is a small town,
arranged along a main street that looks like a back-lot set for a
Western, and populated with a collection of comical, not always
likable characters, sketched by Naruse (who co-wrote the script with
Toshio Yasumi) with an ample supply of backwater obduracy and marital
tension. The arrival of a new family, headed by a gregarious,
polymathic eccentric named Soma (Kingoro Yanagiya), stirs up
resentment; but the townspeople are won over slowly by Soma and his
family's positive attitude and making-do-with-less expertise. The
emotional keynote of the movie is the cheerful bludgeoning of the
audience with the demand that they eat carrot ends and like it, and
one can imagine the look on Naruse's face as he read the memos from
the Toho executives. ("#43. Apple peelings. They taste quite good in
rice congee. This should be mentioned, perhaps by Soma's older
daughter.") Weirdly, there are even suggestions that the homely,
shambling Soma is a divine presence: he enters the town on the heels
of a mysterious windstorm, and clocks stop and start as he arrives and
departs. But it's remarkable how much freedom Naruse enjoyed around
the edges of this strange enterprise - even managing to suggest, via a
few cantankerous citizens, that the triumph of propaganda over human
nature is incomplete. The overall tone is almost childlike, with
impromptu songs, fanciful dance interludes, and a screen-hogging turn
from child actress Meiko Nakamura as a relentlessly cheerful problem
solver. (Nakamura would work again for Naruse as an ingénue, turning
in an appealing comic performance in 1955's WOMEN'S WAYS.) Naruse
effortlessly sustains the rapid, unifying musical-comedy pacing,
despite his presumed inexperience with lighter genres. And the oddity
of the project sometimes coaxes out the modernist in him - as in an
early interlude of rapid, inscrutable cross-cutting among fragments of
life in the various households of the village; or, more bafflingly, in
his termination of several scenes with montages of objects falling or
being thrown around rooms, with no obvious cause. Well-known manzai
comedian Entatsu Yokoyama plays the prickliest (and most easily
converted) town-dweller.
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