Late Chrysanthemums (Bangiku)

"Didn't we almost have it all" -Whitney Huston Maybe this should be called memoirs of a former Geisha. Honestly Naruse sacks you with another depressing story of former "colleges" on different ends of the financial spectrum with one holding clout over the unfortunate…

pirateneckbeard

A film that’s perfectly geared towards all my sensibilities. Catherine Russell is right to defend Naruse as a sociological filmmaker rather than a psychological one. I think it’s his very greatest virtue. And insofar as there is an intrusion of individual subjectivity, it’s…

Avalyn Wu

the metronym of money-in-hand, clock-ticking, chimes at the threshold of death. naruse and his trio of geishas mourn what was lost and what was never there -- who they've become in order to survive, how they see themselves and others, the choices they've settled into with…

comrade_yui

"If I have money, I don't have to depend on anybody." Hones in on the sad necessity of transactional dependency as single women in a fraught, post-Geisha retirement landscape wherein money is everything as age creeps in and beauty fades. The once meaningful bond between…

Dizzle_Sizzle

An incisive portrait of middle-aged world weariness. The titular wilting flowers are a group of aging ex-geisha struggling to get by independently in the postwar period, having been discarded by society after their beauty faded. The central character Kin embraces a…

Cameron W

35mm print Heartbreaking in many more ways than one, but that's just Mikio Naruse for you. I think while watching Late Chrysanthemums, you're seeing how one's happiness might not be what it's cracked up to be, especially when the sadder realities hit so closely. And in…

Jaime Rebanal 🇵🇸

The emotional climax of Bangiku arrives approximately two-thirds of the way into the film, unravelling as a pair of extended rhyming scenes. The former geisha turned hard-nosed moneylender Kin—Sugimura Haruko excellent in one of the rare instances where she was allowed to…

hooch_n_arrack

After a shaky start to the month for me, I had to get back in my comfort zone with some Naruse. This one is about how aging limits the ability of older women to keep up in a society that valued them based on their beauty. Means of making money dissipate with age, whether…

VonBergundy

Naruse's intent was never to show the zenith of a woman's life in his films, it was one's descent into sadness- that tests that woman's resilience in the wake of adverse situations and uncertainties of life. Poignantly rich, in this alluring drama, Naruse gets the better of…

Abhishek