The movie Ginza Makeup/Ginza Makeup (1951) American Standard Collection The Criterion Collection DVD Edition Cover
With the release of three films in 1951, Yoshio Naruse (1905-1969) began to recover from his film career. The three films, Ginza Makeup/Ginza Makeup (1951), Dancing Girl/Maihime (1951) and Rice/Rice/Misaki (1951) – are all female protagonists and set in the city, especially in the first and third films, where the environment and atmosphere of specific urban neighborhoods are established through some details, and as a result they become the constituent elements of the story.
This realism, which incorporates psychological portraits of women's delicate portrayals of bland love and family relationships, became the basis for a selection of his lifelong best films of the 1950s and 1960s. The films also go on and on about the periods of war and occupation, but it is hard to see traces of the censorship of such democratic directives by the Bureau of Civil Intelligence Education.
Stills from the movie Ginza Makeup/Ginza Makeup (1951), By Atsuyo Tanaka and Kyoko Kagawa
It is difficult to say whether Naruse eventually felt that he could follow his instincts more freely, or whether the appropriate subject matter fell on him, and which situation it belonged to. In a 1960 interview, Naruse admitted that starting with Ginza Makeup, "I seem to feel at ease."
Kishi Matsuo, the screenwriter of Ginza Makeup, once wrote a critical essay about Akio Naruse in the 1930s, and he was well aware of the energy and potential of the director. Naruse took inspiration from a screenplay based on Kishi Matsuo's original novel by Yuichiro Inoue, but insisted that the script had to be written more realistically.
According to American film critic Oti Poker Audie Bock, "Kishi Matsuo rewrote the script to embellish the scenes, characters, and dialogue based on the bar life in the dark streets of Ginza, which he and Naruse are familiar with."
Stills from the movie Ginza Makeup/Ginza Makeup (1951).
Naruse mentions that when making Ginza Makeup, he took a "hint" from Fumiko Hayashi's (1903-1951) novel The Fallen Woman, which he had thought of adapting into a film while in Shochiku in the early 1930s, but had failed. In fact, in Ginza Makeup, you can see the precursors of his later film adaptation based on Fumiko Hayashi's novel.
The film is about a barmaid who lives for a few days, and it is ultimately a precursor to the 1960 film Woman Walking Up the Stairs/ Female Stage Stage を上る時 (1960), although it is a few steps below the "social" gradient of the waitress played by Yukiko Tsuji in the 1960 film played by Hideko Takashi (1924-2010).
One of Tsuji's friends, Shizue Sayama (Ranko Hanai), is an early version of Ahin, the heroine of Late Chrysanthemum, who is a stubborn survivor who "makes all the right decisions." When she explains to Yukiko Tsuji, she always looks at things first from the perspective of money, so she is always able to do what she wants to do.
"Ginza Makeup" opens the film with the appearance of a child: the camera follows him through the streets and finally returns to the narrow streets and alleys, pointing out the living conditions of the heroine Tanaka Atsuyo. We see Tsuji Yukiko working at a bar in Ginza, taking care of the child born to her ex-husband alone. His mother had no more to take care of him than to feed the family. Therefore, when Tsuji Yukiko works during the day, he can only wander around the streets and alleys like wild children, very pitiful, and there are helpless scenes of him getting wet on rainy days.
Poster for the Japanese version of the movie Ginza Makeup/Ginza Makeup (1951).
Rao is so happy compared to the children who sell flowers in the bar. Naruse highlights the predicament of his mother, Tsuji Yukiko, with the life of a child, and he does not elevate her life.
On the other hand, Naruse also highlights that the child is the driving force and source of the mother's strong self-sustainment: because of his existence, Tsuji Yukiko did not lose the courage to struggle, although this is not sad, Tsuji Yukiko did her best to seek physical and mental happiness, even if all the efforts in the end failed, there is still a son around to be comforted.
There is a very intriguing scene in the film: Tsuji Yukiko's seemingly promising marriage dream is interrupted by the news of her son's drowning. There is no better indication of her plight than this: it was he who dragged Tsuro Yukiko along, and it was she who gave Tsurou Yukiko the will to live.
This scene points out the pessimistic theme that Akio Naruse has always had: love cannot improve the real life of the many holes. Salvation for survival with love does not work. Therefore, the heroine Tsuji Yukiko heard the news of her son's drowning, and left the ideal object she could not ask for without thinking, which shows that Tsuji Yukiko (and even more the director) has no illusions about reality, and Tsuji Yukiko grasps the only thing she can grasp: children.
The love depiction in this paragraph is childish and simple, but in fact, Naruse Miki's drunken intention is not to drink, in order to break the myth of love, thus showing that the plight of the heroine Tsuji Yukiko is not possible at all.
One of the successes of Ginza Makeup was the de-dramatization of the story when she tracked down Yukiko Tsuji through a series of events designed to show her perseverance as a barmaid in the face of hardships and hardships.
Stills from the movie Ginza Makeup / Ginza Makeup (1951), Kyoko Kagawa
Tanaka's role can be said to be a reproduction of her recent role in the prostitution of guests in films by other directors, including Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956) 'Daughter of the Night/Night Girl' (1948). Commenting on Ginza Makeup in Japan's Movie Review, writer Shigeo Fujii wrote that although he thought he had seen too many similar roles played by Tanaka Katsura — and he had relegated Naruse to a bad B-movie director — the film gave him a surprise.
He points out that Naruse handles the character of Haruto, Tsujiro's son, very well: "What a heavy burden this child is Forshiro Tanaka, but the film does not use him as a means to win the sympathy of the audience, which is a typical bridge section that cheap sensational movies usually concoct."
"When his mother was working, he had no one to take care of him, he took care of himself, Haruo was a self-reliant child, but one day when he disappeared, Tsuji Yukiko immediately ran to look for him. She is forced to leave her favorite man, Ishikawa, who comes to Tokyo to spend time with her sister Kyoko (Kyoko Kagawa), who wastes no time and soon falls in love with him and marries him.
The relationship between the sisters was very close, and this sympathetic relationship between women was probably inspired by Naruse's novels from Fumiko Hayashi's novels, which he also applied to many later films. Yukiko Tsuji was certainly disappointed by the loss of Ishikawa, but she was not jealous of the good family affair her sister had acquired. The two women have talked many times about how hard it is to find a good and trustworthy man.
At the end of the film, Yukiko Tsuji is left alone with her child, vowing to work hard for him. Nothing happens throughout the film, although during the film' progression, Tsuji Yukiko is deceived by a customer and almost raped by a wealthy guest from whom she wants to borrow money.
Her fragile and kind disposition contrasts with some of her colleagues around her, some of whom make friends with small gangsters or, like Shizue, are selfish and controlling. Ishikawa initially had an appointment with Shizue, and she told Yukiko Tsuji to "take good care of him". And she's busy dealing with another boyfriend: Yukiko Tsuji then hands him over to Kyoko because she's going to find the baby.
Japanese DVD cover for the movie Ginza Makeup/Ginza Makeup (1951).
Tsuji Yukiko smoked fiercely, drank heavily, and once stumbled home after an all-night job; but when Ishikawa was around, she became a gentle and courteous lady, which succinctly implied that she did not want to hide her feelings for him, but that was not to say that she did not have the other "decent" personality that a single mother and barmaid should have.
Shigeo Fujii complained that with the exception of some famous landmarks such as the Hattori Building and the covered-up 33 Horikawa (river name), the "smell" of Ginza disappeared when Naruse was dealing with the famous neighborhood. Compared to Naruse's treatment of Asakusa in his 1935 film Asakusa Three Sisters/ Otome's Treatment of Ginza this time, he is less comfortable with Naruse's treatment of Ginza.
In fact, Naruse seems to have used sets for many of Ginza's exteriors, which became passages cast into deep shadows between houses that were very close together. The crowded streets of the bar are twinkling with neon signs written in English and Japanese (Yukiko Tsuji works at a bar called Bel Amie [French: Pretty Friend], a name Ishikawa had seen in Maupassant's novels).
However, location photography was also widely used while Tsuji Yukiko was wandering around the city, and Tsuji Yukiko pointed out to Ishikawa how Tokyo had changed since the war when she took Ishikawa on a tour of Tokyo's streets. Although american soldiers are not seen in the film (subject to the policies of the Civilian Intelligence Education Bureau), we can feel the changes that took place after the war.
Naruse also featured his signature street performers, street storytellers who tell stories to children, and tramps who filled the neighborhood with a folk atmosphere that existed on the fringes of commodity capitalism as hinted at by neon signs. Tsuji Yukiko's home is in Ginza, and downstairs lives a music teacher, a small community where every neighbor helps her find her son, Haruo. Naruse blends location filming and sets, blending pre-war small-town films with post-war metropolises, effectively integrating the pre-war culture of the devastated city into the narrow alleyways beneath the city's bright exterior.
Tsuji Yukiko herself is more or less a relic of the pre-war period, somewhat incompatible with the fancy new culture, and the film makes her try to move forward, and she takes her son across the bridge to a future that has no place for a noble person like her.
This is perhaps the significance of Naruse's modernity becoming an indignant discourse. Melodrama-style loss and nostalgia present the burden of social allegory, and Ginza Makeup may also be viewed through what Yoshimoto believes is the victim consciousness framework of postwar Japanese cinema.
Yukiko Tsuji is a character in Hayashi's novel, a survivor of various adversities, whose ordeal needs to be examined in the sense of cultural criticism, and the realistic portrayal of her life as a barmaid in postwar Japan, a new tendency, shows that Naruse continues to reconstruct the genre of predisposed film in the early 1930s.
The movie Ginza Makeup/Ginza Makeup (1951) is a Chinese DVD cover