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The cramped neighborhoods of working-class Osaka, filled with thieves and prostitutes, provides the setting for the cold marriage at the center of Repast. The glamour, excitement and possibility of Tokyo, personified by the husband’s carefree niece, Satoko (Shimazaki Yukiko), offers an enticing contrast. Or so it seems. One of Naruse’s richest character studies, Repast charts the disillusionment of Michiyo (Hara Setsuko), housewife to Hatsunosuke (Uehara Ken). As the latter internalizes the struggle of a dissatisfying stockbroker gig, the former busies herself with housework and repressed agony, her hardened exterior only exacerbated by her husband’s seeming indifference and drunken trips to Tokyo. But Naruse’s film is not merely from Michiyo’s initially sympathetic point of view. Repeated sojourns into Hatsunosuke’s routine and pleasure-seeking show him to be an average man coping with great stress, while Michiyo’s climactic trip to Tokyo finds her indulging in the same relaxation she chides Satoko for enjoying in Osaka. Piercing stereotypes of the midcentury Japanese marriage even as it provocatively flirts with them, Repast is a penetrating study of the emotional toil involved in seeking happiness. – Carson Lund

Directed by Naruse Mikio.
With Uehara Ken, Hara Setsuko, Shimazaki Yukiko.
Japan, 1951, 35mm, black & white, 97 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