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"Obey family rules," reads the banner amid scribbles. The hexed household goes back generations, descendants of the patriarch and his discarded mistress carry on the knotted lineage, sickly librarian (Ko Nishimura) and common-law wife/maid (Masumi Harukawa). The woman is stolid, rounded, bovine, palpably erotic with her face upside-down as she's nuzzled in bed. Tradition dictates she kill herself from the shame of being raped by a thief (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi), a bungled hanging leads to a bruised rump. Attempts at reaching out fall on deaf ears, the husband just laments his own bad luck: "My wife watches TV all day long, and I buy her a vacuum cleaner." The shock rouses the somnambulist, the numb servant remembers the silkworm crawling up her young thigh, Shohei Imamura's camera grows expressionistic. Low and high angles around a dangling light bulb for the aftermath of the assault, caged mice on a treadmill to split the frame. ("He must have been hungry," marvels the scrawny son at a cannibalized rodent's remains.) The rapist returns, not a beast but a feeble-hearted sniveler peskily declaring his love. Eros and Civilization on the bookshelf, the Ozu train from another angle: From overcast railway platform to caboose in motion, a bravura lateral track of the couple stumbling from compartment to compartment. It builds to a Thermos full of poison in a snow-choked tunnel, "this was supposed to be a happy elopement!" Photographic evidence from the husband's pinched lover (Yuko Kusunoki) is unveiled like celluloid strips and swiftly denied, men and their inhalers and ampules are no match for the persevering peasant who's willed violation into liberation, lady of the manor at last. Oshima the friendly rival has a riposte, Violence at Noon. With Ranko Akagi, Tanie Kitabayashi, Kazuo Kitamura, Shoichi Ozawa, Seiji Miyaguchi, Yoshi Kato, Fumie Kitahara, and Hiroshi Kondo. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |