Mother

Director: Mikio Naruse

1952 / 98min / 35mm

Based on a children’s essay adapted by famed Japanese screenwriter Yoko Mizuki (Sound of the Mountain, Floating Clouds, Kwaidan) in her first work for Naruse, Mother stars the legendary actress-director Kinuyo Tanaka as a beleaguered working class matron, whose self-sacrificing efforts to maintain her family during Tokyo’s postwar reconstruction make her a paragon of maternal virtue in the eyes of her teenage daughter Toshiko (Kyoko Kagawa). Like Huw Morgan in Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, Toshiko idealizes her mother and the value system she embodies, a naive perspective that pleasantly lifts what in fact unfurls as a bitterly sad, episodic tale of slow-burn economic immiseration. Anticipating the films of Hou Hsiao-hsien in its ironically sentimental vision of Confucian dissolution, Naruse’s film is a melodramatic tearjerker for the ages.