By: Jonah Lazar, Staff Writer
A selection of works by one of Japan’s great masters of the silver screen has returned to Vancouver for the first time in 20 years.
Naruse Mikio is an influential director who pioneered Japanese film during the mid-century. He captures audiences with a subtle, solemn, and achingly human depiction of women’s lives following World War II. Despite limited international success (in comparison with other Japanese directors), Mikio is enjoying a posthumous international surge in popularity. Following what would have been his 120th birthday last year, New York’s Japan Society has been collaborating with the Japan Foundation and cinemas across North America to display the director’s films.
Vancouver’s Cinematheque, which has been a mainstay of Howe Street for over half a century, is one of these many cinemas in collaboration with the Japan Society. This series will conclude on February 21 with a screening of Scattered Clouds, Mikio’s final work released just months before he passed away.
On January 25, I attended a screening of Late Chrysanthemums at the Cinematheque along with a few dozen other cinephiles who braved the cold. Late Chrysanthemums follows a handful of former geishas combatting the loneliness of aging by clinging on to their children, past lovers, and memories of their former selves, all the while navigating the turbulent, westernizing postwar Japan.
Through the lens of this loneliness, Mikio highlights the patriarchal nature of the problems which these women face — with all of them unmarried, they scramble to find a foothold to maintain their worth in a changing society which no longer values them for their beauty. Nothing makes this more evident than one of the last scenes of the film, where one of these former geishas tries (and fails) to imitate a younger woman doing the Monroe walk, which serves to highlight how the shift towards western beauty standards has left these women feeling like relics of a lost time.
Late Chrysanthemums is a captivating portrait of weariness, nostalgia, and solitude.
This series is coming to an end soon, but if you still wish to attend, keep your eyes peeled for a couple screenings of When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, one of Mikio’s most critically acclaimed films, which will be shown on February 13 and 15 at the Cinematheque. Another one to look out for is A Wanderer’s Notebook, a film based on the life of the feminist writer and poet, Hayashi Fumiko, on February 20.
Screenings of Mikio’s works will continue until February 21 at the Cinematheque.
