Reviews

If you are looking for a nuclear Armageddon scenario movie, this doesn't quite deserve to be on your list in the same way that, for example, The Day After or Testament do, though it has its own crazy logic. You just don't know for ages where it's going and more so if you don't know the premise. I couldn't stop thinking of a serious version of Scorsese's After Hours shot through with the studio ambiance of Coppola's One From The Heart. It's also somewhat reminiscent of Deterrence, but much better in its ambition. I could forgive the movie so many things if only there were more impetus to the mooted escape scenario with the helicopter. Anthony Edwards (ER's Dr Green) is excellent throughout, you have to say. However, the constant delays to the main couple's possible exit and survival just don't make sense, though the very ending does, in many ways, so there you go. On my second viewing, I upped my star rating. Still have the reservations about the constant deferment of the couple's escape, but I realise now how incredibly powerful and maverick a film this is. Anthony Andrew's performance is a real tour de force.

I watched this in a box set from France with French subtitles, as that may be the only way to see it currently. The audio is inferior and some sequences not really restored at all or not capable of being restored. But it's still worth it. In many ways, this strikes me as more like Ozu than vintage Mizoguchi as the main protagonists are often seen as simple types of great humility, albeit the father wants to make a better life for his daughter by persuading the boy he adopted to marry her. This man, Ono, now about to finish his doctorate, wavers between the homely Sayako and his more elegant suitor, the upper-class Fujio, who is in turn betrothed to his friend Hajime Munechika. It all seems pretty straightforward until a twist near the end which forces you to completely revise your idea of the otherwise upright if somewhat awkward Ono as well as of Hajime. Fujio is played by a radiant Kuniko Miyake, who apparently was a last- minute replacement for the equally radiant Isuzu Yamada. It doesn't quite have the punch of Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, which came soon afterwards, and it definitely resides in melodrama territory, but it's Mizoguchi territory all the same.