Mikio Naruse Box Set (Masters of Cinema)

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Film Description

Although not as well-known as Japanese masters Ozu, Kurosawa and Mizoguchi, Mikio Naruse remains one of Japanese cinema's great talents, and his work eagerly awaits discovery. This collection brings together three of his finest works Repast (1951), Sound Of The Mountain (1954) and Flowing (1956). Repast is a moving work about a wife who fears her stagnating marriage will ruin her life. Sound Of The Mountain is a poignant melodrama, with an especially moving sequence in which a character confesses to an abortion. Flowing details a maid's travails as she is hired to work in a brothel.

Film Information

DVD Extras

3 discs. Audio commentary on Sound Of The Mountain by Kent Jones and Phillip Lopate with audio discussions on Repast and Flowing; 184-page book containing essays, Mikio Naruse biography and detailed discussion of each film.

Technical Details

Film Media

8 Stills

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Reviews & Articles

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Review by Doug Cummings on 6th November 2006

There was something notoriously withdrawn and delicate about the personality of Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse, whose 89 films have only recently begun penetrating the West, where his work has earned immediate and reverent comparisons to the sensitivity and grace of such filmmakers as Yasujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi.
After a late but promising beginning, Naruse endured a 15-year creative slump before creating a masterpiece, Repast, adapted from a novel by Fumiko Hayashi (Floating Clouds). A quietly nuanced tale about a woman (Setsuko Hara) who fears her marriage is silently unraveling, the film abounds with a deep poignancy that not only set an existential - but paradoxically warm - tone for Naruse's films to come, but also inspired a full-scale revival of the shomin-geki "contemporary middle class" genre in Japanese cinema throughout the 1950s. Hara returns in Sound of the Mountain, Naruse's personal favorite of his films, again playing a woman trapped in a loveless marriage; but this time (based on a novel by Nobel prize-winning author Yasunari Kawabata) she finds sympathy and warmth in her relationship with her father-in-law as the two bond in subtle but penetrating ways. Naruse was a filmmaker who understood sadness and disappointment and articulated it like few others, yet his protagonists were never simple victims but endless questers searching for a happiness just beyond their reach. With Flowing, Naruse's double vision of hope and despair fused into a rich, lyrical portrait of geishas attempting to survive in the declining days of geisha culture. Isuzu Yamada (Throne of Blood) plays the manager of a house of entertainment, the site of a flurry of activity and subplots that includes Kinuyo Tanaka (Life of Oharu) as a virtuous maid and Mariko Okada (Late Autumn) as a new-style geisha. As ephemeral and interior as Naruse's cinema is, it's both exacting and everyday by nature, lacking the obvious pictorial poetry associated with Japanese masters, but noted for its uncommonly fine observation and restrained, but deep empathy for the plight of marginalized characters, especially women. It's a cinema that astonishes with its direct and unadorned gaze and is a treasure awaiting discovery.

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Collections & Lists

This film is part of the following Film Collections

Masters Of Cinema

Including: Abhijan (Masters Of Cinema), Asphalt (Masters Of Cinema), Assassination (Masters Of Cinema), Bellissima (Masters of Cinema), Buster Keaton: The Complete Short Films 1917–1923 (Masters of Cinema), Diary Of A Lost Girl, Edvard Munch (Masters of Cinema), F For Fake, Fantastic Planet, Faust (Murnau).

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