Eternal Breasts (Tanaka, 1955): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.45pm
This film, which also screens on November 9th, is part of the Melodrama season at BFI Southbank.New Yorker review: Kinuyo Tanaka was at the forefront of Japanese cinema, deep into an acting career that started with silent films, when she became a director, creating masterworks that would take their place alongside those she appeared in. The 1955 drama Forever a Woman is one of the great movies about a writer. (It’s based on “The Eternal Breasts,” a biography of the real-life poet Fumiko Nakajo.) It stars Yumeji Tsukioka as Fumiko, an unhappily married mother of two young children in Sapporo, who writes poetry in her spare time. After her divorce, Fumiko becomes prolific, locally recognized, and then nationally admired—but her success coincides with a diagnosis of breast cancer. Tanaka films Fumiko’s mastectomy and its physical and emotional consequences with a sensitive yet jolting intimacy. The poet’s creative drive is inseparable from her pain, and her brazen romanticism in the face of death is expressed in moments of overwhelming candor and exquisite restraint alike. Tanaka’s direction is logical, tender, and heartbreaking, conveying worlds of passion in the averted gazes of hopeless love. Richard Brody
Here (and above) is the trailer.
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