Platform Apology as Late as the Train
When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960)
directed by Mikio Naruse
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
It’s easy to wax rhapsodic about the shot composition of an Ozu film, or to express surprise about the modern dilemmas that characters struggle with in An Autumn Afternoon. I feel like I shouldn’t have to engage a movie like this with a preface or explanation, but more than likely that’s a consequence of my reading less and less film criticism as I get older. I’m suspicious of my motivations for doing so (academic scholarship so often has a point to prove, or to force), but it boils down to the idea that I spend more time thinking about movies than talking about them.
After all these years, I can’t pretend that I’ve graduated much beyond my teenage conception of the “foreign” section at the local Hollywood Video. Everything about When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, from the title to the language to the black and white execution, goes against the breezy joy I profess to experience when I sit down to watch a movie. The four cravats aren’t there to fool you, or me, but I still appreciate the untouched Netflix queue, when I don’t know what I’m getting next until the e-mail (and then the disc) appears. Half the time I groan, but I still come across some gems that way – movies I never would have watched if I followed my erratic impulses exclusively.
If a video store in Pittsburgh starts to carry the Warner Archive Collection, I might cancel my subscription and do nothing but live in the shadow of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite pictures from the 1970s for a month or so. But until then, you’ll have to slog through Naruse like the rest of us. And yes, there will always be movies in the foreign section that exemplify how hard it is to be a woman in a man’s world, but very few actresses that star in them will be as good as Hideko Takamine. It can’t only be martial arts assassins that we fall in love with, since it’s so rarely that way (not never, mind you) in the real world.
directed by Mikio Naruse
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from Netflix
It’s easy to wax rhapsodic about the shot composition of an Ozu film, or to express surprise about the modern dilemmas that characters struggle with in An Autumn Afternoon. I feel like I shouldn’t have to engage a movie like this with a preface or explanation, but more than likely that’s a consequence of my reading less and less film criticism as I get older. I’m suspicious of my motivations for doing so (academic scholarship so often has a point to prove, or to force), but it boils down to the idea that I spend more time thinking about movies than talking about them.
After all these years, I can’t pretend that I’ve graduated much beyond my teenage conception of the “foreign” section at the local Hollywood Video. Everything about When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, from the title to the language to the black and white execution, goes against the breezy joy I profess to experience when I sit down to watch a movie. The four cravats aren’t there to fool you, or me, but I still appreciate the untouched Netflix queue, when I don’t know what I’m getting next until the e-mail (and then the disc) appears. Half the time I groan, but I still come across some gems that way – movies I never would have watched if I followed my erratic impulses exclusively.
If a video store in Pittsburgh starts to carry the Warner Archive Collection, I might cancel my subscription and do nothing but live in the shadow of Quentin Tarantino’s favorite pictures from the 1970s for a month or so. But until then, you’ll have to slog through Naruse like the rest of us. And yes, there will always be movies in the foreign section that exemplify how hard it is to be a woman in a man’s world, but very few actresses that star in them will be as good as Hideko Takamine. It can’t only be martial arts assassins that we fall in love with, since it’s so rarely that way (not never, mind you) in the real world.
posted by NPK at 7:56 AM
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