#377: NARUSE, Mikio: When A Woman Ascends The Stairs (1960)

NARUSE, Mikio (Japan)

When A Woman Ascends The Stairs [1960]

Spine #377
DVD

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs might be Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse's finest hour — a delicate, devastating study of a woman, Keiko (played heartbreakingly by Hideko Takamine), who works as a bar hostess in Tokyo's very modern postwar Ginza district, entertaining businessmen after work. Sly, resourceful, but trapped, Keiko comes to embody the conflicts and struggles of a woman trying to establish her independence in a male-dominated society. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs shows the beloved master Naruse at his most socially exacting and profoundly emotional.

111 minutes
Black & White

Monaural

in Japanese

2:35:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2007

Director/Writers

Written by Ryûzô Kikushima.

Mikio Naruse was 55 when he directed When a Woman Ascends the Stairs.

Other Naruse films in the Collection:

Eclipse Series 26: Flunky, Work Hard (1931)
Eclipse Series 26: No Blood Relation (1932)
Eclipse Series 26: Apart From You (1933)
Eclipse Series 26: Every-Night Dreams (1933)
Eclipse Series 26: Street Without End (1934)

The Film

One of the great masterpieces of the Golden Age. Naruse creates a great vehicle for Hideko Takamine (Keiko) — whose character joins Setsuko Hara and Chishû Ryû as great examplars of mono no aware.

Along for the ride are brilliantly drawn characters played by Masayuki Mori, Tatsuya Nakadai, Daisuke Katô, Ganjiro Nakamura, and the dependably sleazy Eitarô Ozawa …

Keiko’s not the only woman who suffers. There’s Yuri (Keiko Awaji) — the biggest tragedy, yet played lightly; Junko (Reiko Dan) — dangerously ambitious; and a nice touch: the great Noriko Sengoku (Kurosawa regular since 1948) as an obsequious fortune teller.

• 0:00:00: Toshiro Mayuzumi’s score is perfection. We open with vibes, piano and bass, reminiscent of the MJQ!
• 0:02:01: Four establishing shots set up the first scene — unlike Ozu there is motion instead of stillness. First of Keiko’s voice-overs …
• 0:02:21: One of the girls (Miyuki [Michino Yokoyama]) has gotten married. Kikushima and Naruse quickly get rid of some important exposition — some girls dream of marriage, others (Junko) of being the big boss … meanwhile, “Mama” (Keiko) is being chewed out by her boss for allowing a client to defect to Yuri’s bar.
• 0:05:47: Mama and Komatsu (Nakadai) are on a bridge when we hear an ambulance siren. Naruse pulls a neat trick, putting dialogue in Keiko’s mouth which we won’t immediately understand.
• “What’s that? I hate that sound …”
• 0:05:56: A body is being carried out on a stretcher. The girls gossip about the suicide. Mama is going to see Miyuki and her husband (Matsui, Yû Fujiki)  to the train station;
• 0:07:16: Soft dissolve … 
• Miyuki: “Compared to handling drunks, his mother will be easy!”
• 0:07:51: Second voice-over:
• “As the office girls are leaving work, our work is just beginning.”
• 0:09:25: Keiko ascends the stairs for the first of four times … (vibes again)
• “I hated climbing those stairs more than anything …”
• Naruse achieves the climb in four cuts:
• 1) wide shot of the entire staircase;
• 2) C/U of her feet, climbing;
• 3) straight-on medium shot of the last few steps; and
• 4) very wide shot as she reaches the the top steps.
• 0:12:21: Having acceding to the demands to bring back Minobe (Ozawa), Mama agrees to accompany him to Yuri’s bar to see what the big is …
• Third voice-over:
• “Yuri worked for me until last summer. She has a gift for handling men.”
• 0:16:22: ascending the stairs for the second time.
• VO: “What to do? The time to decide was looming.”
• The action is reduced to three cuts here. 1) The wide-shot of the stairs (Keiko is slightly hesitant);
• 2) C/U of her feet, climbing — but a slight hesitation;
• 3) Medium shot from behind as she quickens her pace.
• 0:16:40: FTB. VO continues:
• “I went to work at a new bar. Only a few leaves were left on the sycamores.”
• 0:16:58: More men — Goda (Nakamura), Fujisaki (Mori) and Sekine (Kato) ,,, a few of the barmaids place a friendly bet on who Mama will adopt as a patron:
• “The old man from Osaka (Goda) has the most money; but she likes the banker (Fujisaki) best … odds are on him … what about the fat fellow? … not even the running.”
• 0:21:36: Fourth VO:
• “Between 11:30 and midnight, the Ginza’s 16,000 hostesses head home in droves … the best go by cab; the second-rate take the train, and the worst go off with their customers.”
• 0:24:19: Dissolve; VO:
• “Back home, I felt tired and a little drunk …”
• 0:25:29: She is looking at her books and abacus (nice still) and dealing with a dead-drunk Janko. FTB …
• 0:26:00: Komatsu is collecting from Fujisaki. [check out Naruse’s cool cut on action as Fujisaki sits down (two-shot to CU) …]
• 0:30:23: A nice example of the parallelism evident in Naruse’s work:
• Junko brings the persistent “rumor” that Mama put a love note and her photo in her late husband’s funeral urn. She says Komatsu told her when he was drunk … later on (1:44:01), we’ll see that Komatsu says he was drunk with a priest who told him. It’s an important fact, because it concerns the queasy ideas Mama has about marriage.
• 0:34:39: With only straight cuts separating the scenes, we arrive at a medium shot of Junko — in bed, smoking a cigarette … she’s taken a lover, but Naruse takes his time until he turns the camera on Komatsu.
• 0:41:25: Komatsu is showing Mama a prospective bar to purchase (Goda has hinted that he might put up the money) … Mama and Yuri talk of suicide …
• 0:46:17: Straight cut to lit-up Ginza. VO:
• “Women working in the Ginza fought desperately for survival. It was a battle I couldn’t afford to lose.”
• 0:50:48: Listen to Mayuzumi’s dramatic due here, as Mama finds out Yuri’s suicide was for real!
• Naruse shows us the result of Yuri’s choice, through dialogue and facial expression. Yuri’s devastated mom is Sadako Sawamura.
• 0:55:00: The fortune-teller scene. They are both friends with the lingerie shop owner, so it’s not such an amazing surprise when she foretells:
• “I see the word sake in the back of your mind …”
• 0:56:30: VO:
• “I came to work and forgot about everything. She is brutal with Minobe, after having witnessed his employee trying to collect Yuri’s debt from her mother …
• 1:00:25: FTB. VO:
• “It was a small ulcer. Four weeks passed. I spent both Christmas and New Year’s in bed, and the following weeks as well.”
• 1:03:37: Junko — who is watching Mama’s apartment — hooks up with Goda!
• 1:06:37: Straight cut to Mama, looking in the mirror:
• “I feel my youth fading by the day.”
• In her sick bed at home, we get a chance to get to know here brother, Yoshizo (Masao Oda) and mother (Natsuko Kahara) … the family dynamic is in sharp contrast to Mama’s professional life. Naruse skillfully moves from three-shot, two-shot, and close-ups.
• 1:15:30: Dissolve: Signage: Law Offices:
• VO: “Despite what I’d said, I couldn’t let my brother go to jail.” She hails a cab.
• 1:15:49: Back at the bar.
• 1:18:59: Sekine gives her a ride home:
• “I wouldn’t date a woman if I weren’t considering marrying her.” 
• Dissolve; He proposes, then leaves, embarrassed. Naruse frames an empty room, Mama walks into it. The doorbell rings …
• 1:20:23: It’s her brother. Doorbell rings again. It is Sekine. Yoshizo leaves. Sekine meant to give her a present earlier. He delivers it now: Black Narcissus perfume.
• 
  
  
  
  
• 1:24:54: Dissolve; Everyone seems to know that Mama’s received a proposal.
• 1:25:29: Dissolve; Sekine is primping:
• “I don’t have the money today; but I’ll pay your hospital bill soon.”
• “Thank you. That’s a huge help.”
• “Don’t talk like that. We’re not strangers anymore.”
• 1:26:05: Mama’s going to ascend the stairs for the third time — in three cuts, including the same C/U of her feet …
• 1:27:18: Junko tells Mama about the bar she’s buying with Koda’s “help.” Mama knows how this happened. Watch Takamine’s expressions! They convey her innermost feelings without a whisper of a word …
• 1:27:33: Dissolve; Three establishing shots; she dabs some of the precious perfume; the telephone is ringing … straight cut to
• 1:28:51. Two kids on a little bike with a tin can trailing behind (coding a newlywed?) … the camera pulls back to reveal Mama and Mrs. Sekine inside the circle the kids are describing …
• 1:30:26: Dissolve; Mama walking with factories in the background;
• 1:30:38: Dissolve; Mama’s defeated, drinking heavily, talking to the bartender (Toshitsugu Suzuki). Fujisaki walks into with a good-looking geisha …
• 1:33:09: Dissolve (note the frequency of this punctuation, as we near the final moments of the film!) … Fujisaki has ditched the geisha is taking Mama to another bar … after suffering through at least two fake proposals, she is more or less throwing herself at Fujisaki — her true love.
• Straight cut. A telephone ringing in an empty room; cut / Komatsu hangs up, having gotten no answer …
• Meanwhile, a drunk Mama tries to say goodnight to Fujisaki … he takes advantage of the situation and as they fall onto the bed, just out of frame, Naruse cuts to
• 1:35:53: an empty glass, rolling on the floor. Long dissolve …
• 1:35:59: The morning after scene. He’s leaving — for good — to Osaka …
• 1:42:47: Komatsu enters right after Fujisaki leaves. More parallelism! Mama closes the curtains to her bedroom, just as Koda had closed the blinds when he tried to bribe Mama earlier … Komatsu’s unrequited love boils to the surface.
• 1:47:12: A long, slow FTB … we’re at a familiar looking bar; it’s the one Mama looked at (with the shared toilet), now run by Junko, who is talking to Komatsu.
• 1:48:06: Straight cut; Mama at the train station.
• 1:50:18. Nice dissolve from Fujisaki’s face to Mama’s …VO:
• “It had been a bleak ordeal, like a harsh winter. But the trees that line the streets can sprout new buds no matter how cold the wind. I too much be just as strong as the winds that gust around me.”
• 1:50:43: Mama ascends the stairs for the fourth (and last) time. Just two cuts, no close-ups. She’s all smiles, greeting everyone, a delightful veneer hiding all that pain and misery which lies just below the surface. FTB, The End.

Film Rating (0-60):

56

The Extras

The Booklet

Forty-page booklet featuring essays by Phillip Lopate, Catherine Russell, Audie Bock and actor Takamine.

Lopate:

“The posthumous international triumph of Naruse is one of the most unique corrections in film history. During his lifetime, he toiled away at his craft largely unsung, though respected by his peers, making more than eighty pictures. After he died, retrospectives of his work began to tour Europe and America … his work, almost all of which is set in the contemporary era, is about people (very often women) of limited means trying to keep their heads above water, escape domestic quagmires, and realize their dreams in a world rife with betrayals and self-betrayals … Naruse’s refusal to employ cheap, feel-good shortcuts (or, for that matter, facile apocalyptic bleakness) comes as such a relief in contrast to the usual box office fare.”

Russell:

“The cosmopolitan veneer is just another veil over a social institution that is thoroughly Japanese in its regulation on men, and Keiko’s character is emotionally bonded not only the other hostesses but to the various wives on the periphery of her world. One of the film’s achievements was to create a sensitive, humanist portrait of a woman whose profession is at once condoned and despised by mainstream society. Behind the glamorous veneer of the hostess bar is an emotional economy of exploitation, independence, hard work, and sexual desire. When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is not only a beautifully crafted film, it remains one of the few Japanese films to explore a woman’s view of the world of Tokyo hostess bars. ”

Bock:

“Perhaps the most essential technique to the formulation of Naruse’s style is his editing. To be sure, his continuity was all worked out in advance, but there is a mysterious rightness to the choice of shots and an inexplicable appropriateness to the duration of each one. These are techniques that cannot be learned from a textbook and can rarely be copied from another director, .A sense of editing is required, just as a feeling is required for music. Even Kurosawa, who has himself been called ‘the world’s greatest editor,’ has expressed admiration for Naruse’s editing, which uses many more shots than the average Japanese films to make that impression of a powerful river. This is Naruse’s cinema of glances and slight body movements that film critic Tadao Sato has praised. Naruse fully exploited the capacity of film to change the whole direction of a drama through the choice of a shrug rather than a slight frown, a tensing of the body rather than a coy smile, a quick glance at his shirt collar rather than a long stare into a man’s eyes. The culture of Japan values nonverbal communication at a very high level: Naruse is the director who best translated this cultural preference to the techniques of the cinema., In a Naruse film, the point at which one character’s feelings about another change dramatically is often expressed not in words but through these minute shifts of the eyes or the subtlest of small gestures. So it is that disgust or affection blooms.”

Takamine:

“Two great directors spent their lives examining the heart of the common people and capturing the love they felt for them: Mikio Naruse and Yasujirō Ozu. I wonder what these two mean old men are talking about now, in the world beyond. I have the uncomfortable impression I hear a voice saying, ‘Japanese films are no good these days, don’t you agree?’”

Commentary

By Japanese-film scholar Donald Richie, author of A Hundred Years of Japanese Film.

You can’t do better than Richie for any good Japanese film. He is terrific here — informative and insightful.

Video interview

With actor Nakadai.

Theatrical trailer

Extras Rating (0-40):

35

56 + 35 =

91

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