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Older Brother, Younger Sister (Mikio Naruse, 1953)
🕑 Added 2021-02-22 22:39:14 +0000 UTC
First of all, my apologies for not being deeper into Naruse at this point. Last week was pretty rough. Now I am dealing with the aftermath of the winter storm, which means fixing a lot of screwed-up plumbing. I did nothing yesterday but disassemble and reassemble sink and shower fixtures and toilet "guts." (As Red Green famously said, "if the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.")
Anyhoo... Dan Sallitt astutely compared Older Brother, Younger Sister to Tennessee Williams, and that really helped a lot of what I had just watched click into place. Again, we have a family in the midst of dissolution, largely due to social and economic changes. But there is a distinct undercurrent of psychological turmoil here, the first time with Naruse that I've really seen Japan's shifting sexual mores bubble up into Freudian froth.
We begin the film with a group of workers at the riverside. This is a clever ruse, since the men, and the labor they perform, will in no way function as a major plot element. In fact, their role is totally symbolic. One of the workers explains that they used to work for a man named Akaza (Reizaburō Yamamoto), collecting rocks and installing them along the riverbank. Alas, the government poured in permanent concrete embankments, rendering Akaza's business superfluous. As we soon see, Akaza is a broken man with a dysfunctional family, and he wavers between fits of rage and checking out completely. He represents a crisis in Japanese masculinity, with tradition replaced by social and governmental engineering.
But most of Older Brother, Younger Sister is about Akaza's three adult children. Older daughter Mon (Machiko Myō) returns home from Tokyo, pregnant and out of wedlock. She fell for a university student Kobata (Eiji Funakoshi) who has left her in the lurch, despite a halfhearted attempt to meet with her and her family to make small restitution. Mon, now considered a ruined woman, has no choice but to return to Tokyo as a sex worker. This creates near-psychotic rage in Mon's older brother Ino (Masayuki Mori), who delights in humiliating her.
As Ino explains to Kobata, just before beating him up, Mon was his closest friend, someone he wanted to spend all his time with. They even shared a bed. This background, combined with Ino's irrational disgust for post-pregnancy Mon, suggests incestuous desire, and this certainly fits thematically with the economic ruination of the father. For Ino, the family can only survive if it turns inward, with him as the self-appointed guardian of Mon's sexuality. His inability to occupy this patriarchal role more or less cuckolds him.
In the midst of all this barely-controlled madness is the younger sister San (Yoshiko Kuga). At the beginning of the film, her relationship with Taiichi (Yûji Hori) is torn apart by the boy's grandmother, who sees San as "just like her sister," i.e. tarred with the brush of shame. So weak-willed Taiichi, the scion of a moderately successful noodle-making business, capitulates and marries someone else, while hoping to make San his side-chick. San, the most sensible and emotionally grounded member of her family, rebukes him in no uncertain terms. And while it would have been advantageous for her to spurn Mon, she stands by her sister, who helped her pay for her studies in midwifery.
As with the other Naruse films I've seen so far, Older Brother, Younger Sister is immaculately directed without being ostentatious. It seems comically obtuse to think of Ozu as "ostentatious," but his rectilinear compositions are aggressively formalist compared with Naruse's sturdy cinematic architecture. Two- and three-shots are carefully arranged to display power differentials, interiors are frequently claustrophobic, and the open walls of the Akaza house -- dark interior butting up against the bright garden -- is subtly used as a liminal space, signifying escape (or exile) from the family circle. It's Mon who, upon return, is closest to the sunny exterior, but in the end, San must also break out and find her own way. All that remains is an often absent father, a retiring, ineffectual mother (Kumeko Urabe), and Ino, a broken man like his father, stewing in his own juices.
