Capital Celluloid 2014 - Day 276: Sat Oct 4

When A Woman Ascends the Stairs (Naruse, 1960): Barbican Cinema, 4pm

This screening is part of the City Visions seasons at the Barbican.

Chicago Reader:
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.