Apart From You preceded by Flunky, Work Hard!

Director: Mikio Naruse

1931 / 88min / 35mm

The earliest extant film by Naruse, Flunky, Work Hard! is a small miracle of fine-tuned, finicky gag comedy, squirming with uncomfortable punchlines grounded in personal humiliation and the terror of losing face, featuring Isamu Yamaguchi as a down-on-his-luck insurance salesman who, in his flop-sweaty desperation to sell a lucrative policy to the mother of one of his son’s well-heeled playmates, subjects himself and his family to ever-worsening trials of degradation. Paired with the buoyant-yet-brutal tragicomedy Apart from You, in which a new-to-the-game geisha, Terugiku (Sumiko Mizukubo), tries her level best to extend a hand to a rambunctious teenager Yoshio (Akio Isono), an aggressive, antisocial young punk whose resentment of his mother, Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa)—as it happens, Terugiku’s colleague—exists in perfect proportion to his mother’s unstinting adoration of her sainted son. Naruse’s style would change greatly in later years, but his jaundiced view of the human condition, and the nuclear family in particular, would not.

16mm print of APART FROM YOU courtesy of the Japan Foundation