Elegant Beast

Yuzuo Kawashima will always be best known to me as a mentor to one of my favorite directors, Shohei Imamura. He died at age 45 before getting any recognition outside of Japan. It seems some of his film have been getting out like Elegant Beast (1962), which recently under went a 4K restoration. This film, that was scripted by noted director and screen writer Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba among others,) is a story about greed, hypocrisy, and conspicuous consumption in the postwar reconstruction and economic miracle. Kawashima takes an artistic risk by having all of the action take place in an apartment in a new modern high rise building that houses the corrupt Maeda family. This results in Kawashima resorting a number of interesting angles and classical framing to keep the film from being too static. The script is talky-much like a stage play and fast paced-but it all seem to work effectively. The parents, Tokizo Maeda (Yunosuke Ito), and wife, Yoshino Maeda (Hisano Yamaoka), are living off money embezzled by their son, Minoru (Manamitsu Kawabata), from his boss and favors and loans from their daughter, Tomoko's (Yuko Hamada) benefactor, a successful novelist named Yoshizawa (Kyu Sazanka). However, they are outdone by Minoru's coworker and secret lover, Yukie Matami (Ayako Wakao). Yukie has manipulated everyone and remained untouchable legally, so that she can quit her job to run a ryokan inn and raise her son. The only other Kawashima film I have seen is the equally impressive A Sun-Tribe Myth from the Bakumatsu Era, which makes me hope more of his films are restored and sent out into the world for viewer enjoyment.