Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts

Three Sisters with Maiden Hearts (乙女ごころ三人姉妹) is a 1935 drama directed by Mikio Naruse and produced by Toho Company Ltd., the company's first-ever film and Naruse's first sound film (most of his earlier silent films remain lost). A major theme in Three Sisters is financial struggle. The three sisters live with their strict, abusive mother and a trio of other young girls, all of whom rely on meager earnings from their shamisen and dance performances for men in a theater and shady bars in Asakusa, the center of Tokyo's shitamachi, or "low city." I read Naruse grew up in poverty and it's a theme that surfaces in several of his other works.

Another theme in Three Sisters is the dual acceptance and reluctance to accept one's circumstances and social standing. The youngest (Ryuko Umezono; left side in below photo) is permitted by the mother to dress in modern clothing, and the family's hope—that she'll marry well and get out—is invested in her. The eldest sister (Chikako Hosokawa; center in photo) does leave but only to later discover that life is much harder than what she dreamed it would be, while she struggles to cope with a depressive husband dying of TB. And the middle sister (Masako Tsutsumi; right side), the most compelling of the three characters, endures the humiliation of her trade and loneliness while for the most part (when she's not smashing up her shamisen) is purely selfless and unconditionally devoted to the happiness of her sisters, to the bitter end.

The film seems unnecessarily experimental at times, making it more interesting, like the odd camera angles in the boat scene (from shots at head level to views a fish would enjoy if it were to poke its head into air). In this scene, girl and guy light-heartedly chat about what others would think if the boat were to capsize and be taken for a double suicide, a scene that's unnecessary to the plot but an intriguing digression. Another thing that makes Three Sisters interesting is the footage of 1930s Asakusa, from rooftops to back-alleys, and kudos to whomever subtitled the translations of the business names shown on the shop signs.

The Naked Director

I really enjoyed The Naked Director (全裸監督) and kind of binged its eight episodes on Netflix over a couple days. Released in August (2019), the series (co-directed by Masaharu Take) felt fresh in the way it melded genres (comedy, porn, drama, melodrama, gangster, biography) and pokes fun at facets of Japanese society (mosaic blurring of the genitals in porn, reverence for the emperor, AV otaku culture). The genres clash at times, too, which caught me off guard more than once, like those super serious scenes with Koyuki Kato followed by the hilarious and near slapstick bits.

The Naked Director is based on the real-life story of Toru Muranishi, a porn film director who eventually became known in Japan as the Emperor of Porn. The series focuses on his rise (and many stumbles) to the top, beginning with selling encyclopedias in Sapporo and then moving on to the business of plastic-wrapped pornographic magazines, or binibon in Japanese, and then upwards into the porn industry with an office in Kabukicho.

Jun Kunimura and Lily Franky give strong performances, and most of the acting, except for some of what the non-Japanese actors deliver, is fairly solid. There's a scene that didn't fit in with the rest of it, though—the one in which Kunimura's character, a yakuza boss named Furuya, takes Shinnosuke Mitsushima's character, who's Muranishi's business partner, down into a dank Kabukicho cellar. Three women are chained to the floor and begging for methamphetamine, and Furuya explains they regularly take girls who've lost their way, get them hooked on the drug, and then "break them in" before selling them. Then a yak subordinate proceeds to rape one, at the behest of Furuya, who next stabs the younger, tattooed underling in the back and right out through the chest. It seems we're supposed to like this baddie, Furuya, to some extent by the end of the series, so I'm not sure why the violent scene was included. Was it to explain in retrospect why Mitsushima's character later uses heroin (to numb himself against PTSD) and steals the uncensored films? But it's brutally incongruous, even with all the genre mixing.

I was thrilled to see Shinjuku Tiger make a brief appearance (not the real guy but a man in a tiger mask and on his bicycle delivering newspapers). I used to see this guy every few days in the 90s and as recently as about a decade ago. I wonder if he's still around.

The real Toru Muranishi

Oishi Bentoooo!

Shoplifters

Twice in one week I've come to the end of a film and felt like I was being abandoned in a quagmire of anxiety and hopelessness. The other movie is Dogtooth, and this one is Shoplifters (Japanese: 万引き家族) (2018), a Japanese drama, written and directed by Hirokazu Kore-eda, starring Lily Franky, Sakura Ando, Mayu Matsuoka, Kairi Jō, Miyu Sasaki, and Kirin Kiki. Though not blood relatives, the characters (pictured) rely on shoplifting, pachinko, sex shows, and cons to cope with poverty, and on each other extremely so, but more than they realize till later. The story is beautiful, deeply sad, well-acted, and particularly thought-provoking. It takes you steadily in one direction and then wrenches you backwards, leaving you wanting somehow to melt into the picture and do whatever to help these people. Nominated for numerous awards, and with techniques used in other Japanese films, like Ozu's "pillow" and camera-straight-into-face shots, it's not a must-see Japanese film; it's a must-see film.