Skip to main content

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.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Paintings in Proust: Vesuvius Erupting by J.M.W. Turner

In Proust’s Swann’s Way , the narrator’s grandmother is described as one who inculcates in her grandson a reverence for the “elevated ideals.” Infinitely disdainful of the mechanical nature of replica, when shown photograph of the magnificent Mount Vesuvius his grandmother dismisses it with a lofty query as of whether other more acknowledged artists did paintings of the volcano in the first place. She is having in mind the great J.M.W. Turner, whose depiction of Vesuvius in flame displays, in her view, “a stage higher in the scale of art.” The enduring fascination with volcanoes was especially evident in the 19 th century, which saw an irregularly high frequency of Vesuvius eruptions that, at the time, alarmed many of the imminent cataclysm that a thousand of years before destroyed the city of Pompeii. Turner, according to a number of sources, may not be amongst the first-hand witnesses of those eruptions, but badgered his geologist friends, John MacCulloch and Charles Stoke
1 comment
Read more

Franz von Stuck, Two Dancers

Dancers can be like jousters. Fear and excitement wring their hearts so into tangled skein. Fluttered air brushes against their skins like chill. In anticipation of a good, likely interminable, fight both cannot be more well-prepared, grimacing to each other some distances afar as menacing demonstration of their unconquerable audacities. Everything is all so punctiliously rehearsed and choreographed. Even when darkness descends and everything is shrouded in utter invisibility, each dancer will know by heart when to put which foot forward, to which direction she will sway elegantly her supple bodice to duck narrowly from her opponent, and when the time is ripe, she will let her skirt billow like an arch of rainbow, the more fiery and colourful the rainbow the likelier the chance the dancer is going to claim the final victory. It is always something with Art Nouveau that, when beholding a piece that epitomises most substantially the essence of the said art mov
Post a Comment
Read more

John Martin, the Great Day of His Wrath (1853)

The sky is ablaze with burning flames and the earth splits asunder- the image of an impending apocalypse looms. Those paintings are impregnated with forebodings of the demise of all living things, and can be served as memento mori- mostly cautionary tales that remind people of their mortality. Landscape paintings that depict the biblical scenes of eternal damnation (most often the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah) are sometimes reinterpreted as prophetic visions of the end of the world. Painters as early as one in the Romantic period, John Martin, conjured up images that continued to awe and frighten the viewers of today. In John Martin’s The Great Day of His Wrath (1853) a volcano erupts and its ashes and fire surge towards the air, rendering the sky an infernal red. One can easily establish himself into the painting and feel the quake rumble under his feet. The earth takes a topsy-turvydom, where the ground and sky suddenly become one. There are people in the paintin
Post a Comment
Read more