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Review: When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)

 



Made at the tail end of a decade marked by the nation’s slow recovery from war and its subsequent democratisation, Mikio Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs(1960) addresses a subject at once bold and timely: the travails of womanhood in a patriarchal society. Social commentary was primarily what Naruse aimed for but in place of irony and satire one finds, by turns, empathy and a dispassionate understanding of the still repressive mores of ‘50’s Tokyo. This apparent contradictory tone in a sense parallels the heroine’s central conflict in regards to financial independence and the inevitable loss of dignity and personal values that comes with it.

 

Keiko, lovingly called “mama” by her friends and customers, struggles to keep afloat as a bar hostess in Ginza, the locus of Tokyo’s cocktail tradition, amidst a growing shift of business trend that promotes a more accentuated fusion of alcohol and sex. Widowed from a young age, Keiko adheres to a strict moral code that forbids her to give herself to any man, a source of both frustration and fascination to her many suitors. Female chastity, a misplaced ideal especially in Keiko’s line of work, takes on varying connotations: it is innocence, to be pounced on by the crooked; a fortification ready to be assailed and shattered; a sacredness, a virtue that inflames the desire to possess. Ultimately, it must be given away, in the sense that beauty is there simply to be sullied. In one of the powerful sequences of the film, Keiko, her defense finally conquered by a man to whom her love is unrequited, concedes defeat by way of raw emotions: “I had a dream that I was crying. When I woke up I really was crying.”

 

The material and the subject may easily lend themselves to the service of a melodrama, but Naruse, true to his characteristic style, opts for an understated portrayal that presents Keiko as neither a victim nor a victor of her time. Whereas Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria(1957), released three years prior to Naruse’s film and widely regarded as its companion piece, trumpets the interiorisation of everyman, Naruse treats emotional matters as ultimately dictated by a degree of privacy. The narrative is punctuated with Keiko’s occasional monologues, which compose chiefly of succinct, matter-of-fact statements of the episodic events, much like the title cards of a silent film but without the customary wry humour. 

 

Partially informed by the French New Wave, the film refrains from a ponderous tempo that normally accompanies such type of storytelling. Like Goddard and Varda, Naruse gamely blends the funereal with the joyful: the projected nonchalance connotes a way of living modeled on the determinist presupposition of life’s ultimate futility. With Keiko, the director’s prism is nonetheless empathetic, and this may also due in a large part to an exquisite performance by Naruse’s regular, Hideko Takamine. The film’s coda - Keiko ascending the stairs of the bar and braving the customers with a smile - has long been held a trenchant and pioneering claim on proto-feminism in Japan, but in light of the prevailing tone of restraint and emotional detachment, it seems rather an ad-hoc dignification that the film can do without.

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