Film screening: Apart From You (Kimi to wakarete)

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Compressing such topics as mother-son estrangement, juvenile delinquency, petty crime, violence, romantic heartbreak and poverty into one dense hour of silent melodrama, Naruse’s Apart From You offers an incisive portrait of lower-class struggle in urban Japan. Yoshio (Isono Akio) is a troubled teen ashamed of his geisha mother, Kikue (Yoshikawa Mitsuko), who endures the burden of her son’s erratic behavior silently but finds a supportive colleague in a younger geisha, Terugiku (Mizukubo Sumiko). When Yoshio develops a bond with Terugiku, the former begins to see the error of his ways, but this revelation does not come without significant compromise. Naruse’s style in this incident-rich tragicomedy is direct and uncompromising, his unfussy medium-shots revealing hidden depths of emotional severity. In a particularly wise detail, the director fixates on a rip in Yoshio’s sock as a microcosm of the deprivation and shame of poverty, an early example of a fetishistic image he would return to at other points in his oeuvre. – Carson Lund

Live musical accompaniment by Robert Humphreville.
Directed by Naruse Mikio.
With Yoshikawa Mitsuko, Isono Akio, Mizukubo Sumiko.
Japan, 1933, 16mm, black & white, silent, 72 min.
Japanese intertitles with English subtitles.

Preceded by
Flunky, Work Hard!
Directed by Naruse Mikio.

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