MOVIE REVIEW : ‘WOMAN’ AND NARUSE SERIES ASCEND

Mikio Naruse’s style is like a great river with a calm surface, and a raging current in its depths.

--Akira Kurosawa

In Mikio Naruse’s “When a Woman Ascends the Stairs” (opening Friday at the Venice Fox International), one of Japan’s greatest film makers takes us into a twilight world of public pleasure and private anguish. We enter a city playground bathed in neon, liquor and pain, thick with saxophone smoke and the bright, plaintive melodies of American torch ballads.

It’s an Asian world, but it seems to pulse to the cheap, lyrical anguish of Cole Porter’s “Love for Sale.”

This is the world of the bar girls of Tokyo’s Ginza District during the early ‘60s, successors to an earlier generation’s geishas. We watch, with a sympathy that precludes moral condemnation, how they live, how they work or love (sometimes the same thing), and even, occasionally, how they die. More specifically, we watch one bar hostess named Keiko (Hideko Takamine).

Keiko is a fish out of water. Her blend of seductiveness and restraint perplexes and intoxicates her admirers--her manager Komatsu (Tatsuya Nakadai) and the customers who follow her from bar to bar. She hates her job, disdains gaudy kimonos and refuses to sleep with patrons who offer to “invest” in her. She is a Ginza girl out of economic need, a widow supporting a weakling brother and ungrateful mother. But she has reached the point where beauty will begin to fade--when she must find a way out or succumb. Like many Naruse characters, she is surrounded by walls, hemmed in by life.

“When a Woman Ascends the Stairs” (1960) is the debut film in a monthlong series devoted to director Naruse, whom many critics now rightfully place--along with Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu--in the Grand Quartet of Japanese cinema. Excellent as it is, and long overdue for a wide public run on Western movie screens, it is probably not even the best of the retrospective (the four that follow it are nearly perfect films).

The problem may be technological. Naruse had one of the subtlest dramatic-pictorial styles in all Japanese film, and here he sometimes seems uncomfortable with the wide compositions of Cinemascope. Yet it’s a wonderful film anyway, full of the understated compassion, delicately sustained nervous tension and precisely observed psychology that were his hallmarks.

The whole cast is superb. Hideko Takamine was Naruse’s favorite actress (and Japan’s most popular) for decades; she plays Keiko with a mysterious blend of openness and discretion, like a cat tiptoeing over silk, or delicately avoiding rainfall. As the banker-customer whom Keiko loves, Masayuki Mori (“Rashomon,” “Ugetsu”) hauntingly suggests the weakness of a handsome, successful man too rarely tested. And the young Nakadai (later the tragic monarch of “Ran”) has the eerie good looks and cocky sensitivity of a Japanese Paul Newman.

Naruse’s greatest strength lay in his dark vision, his uncompromising pessimism. He was a master portraitist of the traps and betrayals of life, and here he refuses to soften Ginza life--the exploitations or the hypocrisies.