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A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
01
Why this pick
Naruse again pairs Hideko Takamine’s restrained performance with an unsentimental portrait of a woman navigating financial precarity, social judgment, and affection that offers no easy escape.
02
Why this pick
Its devastating emotional restraint, postwar disillusionment, and recurring pull between love and self-erasure closely echo the quiet ache and fatalism of Yearning.
03
Why this pick
A tougher, more socially abrasive study of a woman enduring exploitation and economic change, driven by the same attention to survival rather than melodramatic consolation.
04
Why this pick
Naruse observes middle-aged women confronting money, aging, and old attachments with the same precise, unromantic compassion that makes Yearning so bruising.
05
Why this pick
Though more stylized and folkloric, it shares Yearning’s severe compassion for family duty, sacrifice, and individuals crushed by communal and economic necessity.
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01 / THE STORY
Reiko Morita (Hideko Takamine) is a widow who loses her husband in war. Bombing destroys his family's shop and the widow stays to rebuild it as the rest of the family flee and runs it for 18 years out of love for her dead husband and his mother. The film starts after 18 years when a new supermarket threatens to put them out of business. The sisters conspire to turn the shop into a supermarket and get rid of their brother's widow. Meanwhile, the surviving younger brother 25-year-old Koji Morita (Yūzō Kayama) loafs around, losing jobs, getting drunk, laid and gambling. In the crisis, he confesses to his shocked sister-in-law, 12 years older, that he has always loved her and can't deal with it. She cares for him, but in the motherly, elder sister way. She rejects him and decides to return home to her family, threatening suicide if he stops her. This suits the sisters, but he follows her onto the long train ride. On the way, she softens and they disembark for a country inn, where they can talk. He resumes his approaches, but at the last minute, she can't face intimacy. He storms out and gets drunk. He calls Reiko up and says he is going back home. In the morning, Reiko looks out the window and sees him being carried into the village on a stretcher, his face covered. Someone says he fell from a cliff. Reiko runs after him but falters. The last shot is of her face, blank, as she realizes what happened.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
Takako Morita
