Morning's Tree-Lined Street

[Dan Sallitt]

A former thread on this film is closed:

http://groups.google.com/group/naruseretro/browse_thread/thread/d62758b98136de89

This 1936 film, which Naruse wrote as well as directed, goes so
conceptual in its final third that I didn't decide that I liked it
until 15 minutes after it was over. But it's certainly the most
confident of the three films that Naruse made that year, and possibly
the earliest indication that Naruse's surrealist tendencies could take
the driver's seat. Wallpapered with occasionally distracting
soundtrack music, the movie follows a level-headed country girl Chiyo
(Sachiko Chiba, in what seems to be her final role for Naruse) as she
moves to the city and tries to avoid becoming a bar hostess, a fate
that has already befallen her old friend Hisako (Ranko Akagi). Much
of the film's effective, melancholy first two-thirds is devoted to the
texture of bar life as seen by the wary outsider Chiyo. The hostess
world is clearly a sad business that takes its toll on the women
caught in it, but it's depicted without melodrama or villains. The
occasional incident, like a glass-throwing fight or a girl drinking
herself into a stupor, is deprived of story context and turned into
ambiance; mostly the bar girls merely seem to have relinquished social
restraints, spitting in public or eating out of the cook's rice pot.
Despite the efforts of a friendly customer named Ogawa (Heihachirô
Ôkawa, the older brother in THE ROAD I TRAVEL WITH YOU) to find a
better position for her, Chiyo resigns herself to accepting a hostess
job (Naruse marks the decision with a forboding, elegant ellipsis) and
is assimilated into a life of men and alcohol.

(Spoilers are coming, though one can argue that the film plays better
when spoiled.)

Suddenly the film seems to go downhill abruptly, as Chiyo runs away
with Ogawa, then learns that he is a wanted embezzler. Everything
suddenly seems coarser: Chiyo's prudence is replaced by oblivious
devotion, and Ogawa's shifty behavior signals his treachery clearly.
After taking up almost a quarter of the film, and just as the plot is
about to expire in melodrama, the embezzler story is revealed as
Chiyo's drunken dream! And Naruse wraps up the movie with the
restraint that we thought he had abandoned, and with a bold rejection
of the sympathetic love story. The outrageousness of this narrative
curveball - there was even a dream within the dream sequence - is
compounded by the glimpse it gives us of desires that Chiyo does not
permit herself to show otherwise. And yet the dream sequence is quite
disillusioning while it lasts: the film simply seems to have gone off
the rails. Only afterwards can one take pleasure in how well all the
pieces of Naruse's crafty conception come together. Was this
absurdist plan Naruse's way of coping with a studio head who insisted
on an action climax? I'd love to know.

[Dan Sallitt]

"Absurdist" in the last sentence of my earlier post is wrong;
"surrealist" is better.