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The familiar elements of traditional Japanese domestic architecture—the shoji, genkan, engawa and tatami—rarely seemed more like the border lines of an inescapable cage than they do in Naruse’s Wife, one of his more desolate dissections of married life and middle age. In the film’s opening moments, we’re introduced to Mineko (Takamine Mieko) and Toichi Nakagawa (Uehara Ken) via dueling inner monologues that quickly establish the Nakagawa home as a place of loveless stagnation, but the ensuing scenes show that the couple at least has the ostensibly pleasurable distraction of a rotating gallery of second-floor tenants. Gradually, as those housemates reveal shades of negligence, promiscuity or alcoholic rage, even those distractions cannot disguise the gnawing void at the heart of Mineko and Toichi’s relationship, which is exposed when the latter begins a tacit affair with the sweetheart typist (Yatsuko Tanami) at his office job. The widening network of Wife’s narrative accumulates painstaking detail as it goes along, finding sympathy in each character’s dilemma even as it holds their hypocrisies and shortcomings under a microscope. Where it all leads is quietly shattering. – Carson Lund

Directed by Naruse Mikio.
With Takamine Mieko, Uehara Ken, Mikuni Rentaro.
Japan, 1953, 35mm, black & white, 96 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.

Harvard Film Archive Floating Clouds... The Cinema of Naruse Mikio film series co-presented by the Japan Foundation and co-sponsored by the Reischauer Institute