Currently Watching When a Woman Ascends the Stairs By Hideko Takamine, Tatsuya Nakadai see related

Allegedly, a DVD company with an impressive history of reissuing classic Japanese film on DVD may be releasing Mikio Naruse's When A Woman Ascends The Stairs on DVD in the US in the not-too-distant future.  I'd strongly encourage anyone who hasn't seen it to check it out.

Naruse was oft-compared - unfavorably and unfairly to the more revered Yasujiro Ozu.  Ozu's films are notable - to me - for their sense of exhaustion in the face of cultural change, and for their one-of-a-kind visual artfulness.  Naruse's appeal - to me - is quite different.

If Naruse superficially recalls Ozu, in other ways it would be Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk or Luchino Visconti - masters of a visually elegant, ironic and very, very queer melodrama, and within this framework Naruse's take on tradition departs rather sharply from that of Ozu - where Ozu's protagonists are resigned to a certain reconciliation, Naruse's protagonists are doomed to be thought of as outcasts.  And - at least occasionally - they embrace the implications of such a designation, even as they also struggle through moments of bitterness:  Naruse makes the potential heroism of their position explicitly clear, dares an audience to empathize (and question their own 'place' in society as they do so), and rarely ends a film with the conciliatory notes that Ozu preferred. 

Film critics and scholars - mostly male and mostly straight - typcally have held Naruse's films at arms' length - perhaps for all of these reasons.  Certain films: When A Woman Ascends The Stairs and Late Chrysanthemums both could acquire the kind of semiotic queer significance that certain Western films (Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, Visconti's Le Notti Bianche, Wilder's The Apartment) have, and for essentially the same reasons.  Interest in Naruse - whose films have never been widely seen outside of Japan - largely rests upon a handful of traveling festivals that made it to the US during the 80s and 90s, and a handful of now-out-of-print VHS releases.  This sporadic distribution has still managed to auto-generate a slow-building clamor among cinephiles to see restored releases made available on DVD. 

Naruse's beautiful, smart but world-weary women, and the very attractive but oft-shady men around them are overdue for a second look - beyond the potentailly campy melodramatics of Naruse's films, there is the lush, extravagant, unforgettable aesthetic sense, which finds beauty amid clutter, and great virtue among those a society would cast as rejects.

Coming soon to a DVD player near you?