MOVIE REVIEWS : Naruse Retrospective Opens Tonight

The five films of the Mikio Naruse retrospective, which begins tonight (at Laemmle’s Monica 4-Plex), are quiet, reflective portraits of people who keep their emotions under wraps. Yet, beneath these calm exteriors--faces and voices that barely suggest the tremors within--we can glimpse great suffering, great love, great dreams that perish.

“Late Chrysanthemums,” a study of four aging geishas, adapted from stories by Naruse’s favorite writer, Fumiko Hayashi, begins the retrospective. The others include his generally acknowledged masterpiece, the devastatingly sad romance “Floating Clouds” (1955)--also based on a Hayashi story (April 18-19); the psychological family drama “Sound of the Mountain,” taken from the novel by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, (April 11-12); and two lesser-known, but no less powerful works, the unforgettable 1956 “Flowing” (April 25-26) and the jazzier and more contemporary 1960 “When a Woman Ascends the Stairs” (May 2-3).

Naruse’s people are ordinary--and some not so ordinary--Japanese of the immediate postwar years, people who had seen their lives change so radically that adjustment itself is an ordeal. Geishas, Ginza bar ladies, families, parted lovers caught up in postwar convulsions and upheavals--all of them are subject to the merciless scrutiny of his camera. His films are about the tragedies we can barely see, yet which are around us all the time: the tragedies of blighted love, wasted lives and a world in transition.

Akira Kurosawa once said that Naruse’s style “is like a great river with a calm surface, and a raging current in its depths.” Yet only a fraction of the American filmgoers who know Kurosawa will have heard of his colleague. Even so, Naruse is often classed with Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu, the quartet of great Japanese filmmakers whose careers began before World War II. Like the older Mizoguchi and Ozu and the younger Kurosawa, Naruse began in a movie industry rigidly stratified, under a militaristic culture. Like them, he was an unabashed humanist who, surprisingly, took much of his inspiration from American filmmakers.

Like George Cukor or Ingmar Bergman, he was known as a woman’s director, and Japan’s most popular movie actress of the ‘50s, Hideko Takamine, worked for him regularly, in “Floating Clouds,” “Flowing,” “When a Woman Ascends the Stairs” and many others.

So did the almost equally famous Setsuko Hara and Kinuyo Tanaka; he gave them some of their finest roles. Like Mizoguchi, Naruse’s preferred subject was the suffering or problems of women, and this is why, in a way, his cinematic world is empty of heroes. Unsparingly, he shows us the world that heroes ignore, but whose problems have often been created by their callousness or indifference.

That is what Naruse’s best films offer: truth. His style is one of perfect simplicity, utter clarity. In “Floating Clouds,” we see how an obsessive love, for an unworthy object, can dominate or destroy a woman’s life. In “Sound of the Mountain,” we see how a family can be riven by unspoken passions and hypocrisies. In “Flowing,” we see how a whole way of life can simply, quietly dissolve and die.

This is life, the films say, with devastating understatement. You cannot escape it or conquer it, for in every case, life presents a wall, sometimes only partially visible. Is this a bleak or depressing view? Only if one forgets that truth and its pursuit, in movies and elsewhere, always carry their own powerful exhilaration.

Information: (310) 394-9741.