Review: Daughters, Wives and a Mother

The film is something of a dull slog through territory better covered in Mikio Naruse’s prior Sudden Rain.

Daughters, Wives and a Mother
Photo: Toho Company

Featuring one of Mikio Naruse’s most beautiful endings (a sublime visualization of generational reconciliation with the titular matriarch running to assist a weeping infant), Daughters, Wives and a Mother is unfortunately something of a dull slog through territory better covered in the director’s prior masterpiece Sudden Rain. Setsuko Hara stars as Sanae Sakanishi, widowed at the film’s outset and left a substantial inheritance that soon becomes the instigator of much familial discord. The vicious edge that Naruse brought out of the actress in Sudden Rain is nowhere evident; she’s back to her usual smiling self, projecting a sort of resigned luminosity that tramples nearly everything and everyone in its path, most unfortunately Naruse regular Hideko Takamine as her even more subdued sister (a case where two powerful personalities effectively cancel each other out). Naruse’s typically piercing psychological insight—comparable to the best work of Henry James and Eric Rohmer—only emerges in select scenes: in addition to the above-mentioned final image, a moment where Sanae rejects her vintner lover Kuroki (Tatsuya Nakadai) while foregrounded against the chiaroscuro shadows of dancers in a restaurant, as well as a superb sequence, in which the Sakanishis view the youngest son’s home movies, that hints at the growing emotional divides that will ultimately tear the family apart.

Score: 
 Cast: Setsuko Hara, Reiko Dan, Daisuke Katô, Masayuki Mori, Tatsuya Nakadai, Hideko Takamine, Akira Takarada, Ken Uehara  Director: Mikio Naruse  Screenwriter: Toshirô Ide, Zenzo Matsuyama  Distributor: Toho Company  Running Time: 123 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1960

Keith Uhlich

Keith Uhlich's writing has been published in The Hollywood Reporter, BBC, and Reverse Shot, among other publications. He is a member of the New York Film Critics Circle.

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