Capital Celluloid 2018 - Day 168: Tue Jun 26

When A Woman Ascends the Stairs (Naruse, 1960): Prince Charles Cinema, 8.45pm



This 35mm screening is part of the Cinematic Jukebox season at the Prince Charles. You can see the full details of the season here.


Chicago Reader review:
A 1960 film by Mikio Naruse, perhaps the greatest Japanese director as yet unknown to American audiences. Where most directors begin with an anonymous style, Naruse started out as a strong individualist (Wife! Be Like a Rose!) and gradually pared his work down to the sublime blankness of his late films, of which this is one. It's a melodrama of extreme emotional violence—about a woman (Hideko Takamine) who runs a bar in Tokyo's Ginza district and the seemingly endless series of betrayals that befall her—but Naruse treats it with such evenness that it becomes microscopically subtle: its deepest pain is conveyed by lack of expression on the actor's face. With Masayuki Mori (Ugetsu) and Tatsuya Nakadai (Kagemusha).

Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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