Okuni And Gohei (1952) is the rare and surprising return to jidai geki for director Mikio Naruse. It may have been an attempt to match Akira Kurosawa's success with Rashomon which won the top prize at the Venice film festival in 1951. It is an adaptation of a Junichiro Tanizaki play set int he Edo period. It is a story about a high-born woman , Okuni (Michiyo Kogure) who is traveling around the country with her samurai retainer Gohei (Tomoemon Otani). The are searching for Tomonojo (So Yamamura) who has killed Okuni's wife and Gohei's master so that they can end their vendetta and return home. We learn form flashbacks that Tomonojo was her first love and things get complicated when Gohei nurses Okuni back to health after she gets sick. They have fallen in love with each other, which Tomonojo has realized by following them-as indicated by his shakuhachi playing along th eroute. He urges then to forget the vendetta and run off together, but Okuni orders Gohei to kill him and in his last dying breath reveals that he and Okuni were once lovers. These words will haunt the two as Gohei tells Okuni that he hears the shakuhachi. Catherine Russell in her book The Cinema of Naruse Mikio suggests that:
...it may be possible to read it as a parable of misplaced trust and lost opportunity. Okuni and Gohei kill their chance at freedom and are left to face an unchanged world, much as the Japanese found themselves at the end of the American occupation, left with only a vague -and dangerous-memory of "home" before the war and defeat...If the film is a parable, warning not to let go of democratic reforms, it is admittedly oblique; it is above all the atmospheric abstraction and haunted ending that lends it the tone of allegory.
The postwar period is often considered Naruse's slump period, but as this film and otehr strong films such as Ginza Cosmetics and Meishi show a master experimenting with new genres and ideas. There are plenty of cinematic moments in this film with dolly shots, zoom ins and outs, and exquisite framing throughout.
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