Metrograph

With his penultimate Fumiko Hayashi adaptation, Naruse sought to compose a “summary of everything Hayashi meant to me,” and fittingly this modernist masterpiece stands out among his films for the epochal sweep and heightened register of its story of a time-spanning tragic passion. It’s 1946. Repatriated to Japan, Yukiko (Hideko Takamine) seeks out her former lover Tomioka (Masayuki Mori) amid the rubble of Tokyo, expecting to resume the romance they began as colonial functionaries in occupied Indochina, only to find a spiritually defeated man too cowardly either to leave his wife or remain faithful to her. As the years pass, Yukiko follows Tomioka from one ruined or remote region of postwar Japan to another, the two drifting in and out of each other’s lives, seemingly suspended in time and bound only by a shared sense of desperation. In a genuinely iconic performance, perhaps the greatest of her roles for Naruse, Takamine is heartbreaking as a woman who refuses to give up her love even if all that remains of it is a memory.