The Moon Has Risen / Tsuki wa noborinu (1955)

Mie Kitahara spying on her sister

Kinuyo Tanaka’s second foray into directing is a surprising movie, a romantic comedy without any real conflict. There are of course problems along the way or there would be no movie at all, but there are no serious misunderstandings or mislaid messages, no serious class divisions, nor even any interfering friends or jealous competitors. Nothing stands in the way of the eventual pairings of the happy ending but the lovers themselves.

A gentle father (who else but Chisu Ryu) has three daughters, one a widow, the other two as yet unwed. None seem particularly eager to get married, nor does the father give any indication he wants them to be married off. A young engineer comes to town to do some work and stays with a friend, and casually mentions that he remembers the middle daughter (Yoko Sugi) from childhood. The youngest daughter (Mie Kitahara) decides this means they are meant for each other and proceeds to try to bring them together for a moonlight tryst.

The romantic moonlight walk

This doesn’t seem to have worked, until he sends back coded messages for her from Tokyo and she simply goes shopping in Tokyo and never returns. Kitahara meanwhile has had an argument with the friend of the Tokyo man and they both realize that they too are meant for each other and take off for Tokyo together.

Though Ryu and Shuji Sano as the mature neighbor get top billing, they hardly appear on screen. The movie belongs to Mie Kitahara, and how you respond to the movie will basically depend on how you respond to her performance.  For most of the movie she acts like a cross between Gidget and Alicia Silverstone in Clueless playing matchmaker based on childish notions of romance, even though she tells us several times that she is 21 years old.  I suppose she needed to be 21 in order for her to pair off at the end, but her character would have made a lot more sense if she were the cute meddling teen-aged sister. (Kitahara was actually 21-22, depending on exactly when the movie was shot, but not that much different in looks than in Crazed Fruit barely a year later.  The confusion is not that she looks and acts like a teenager* — this was and is standard practice in American movies where teenagers are almost never played by teenagers — but that she admits to being her real age.)

Since Ozu is a credited co-writer of the script along with Ryosuke Saito, there is a tendency to look for an Ozu movie, or at the very least an homage to Ozu. This expectation is further underlined by casting Chisu Ryu as the father and using Tokanobu Saito, Ozu’s usual composer, for the music score. Ryu obliges by saying “um” with his usual lack of aplomb and Saito produces an unusually sappy set of themes, but fortunately these are mostly used in the transitions rather than under the dialogue.

But somehow, Ozu seems to have been erased from the plot itself. This was made at Nikkatsu, the “modern” studio that after re-opening its doors in 1954 had welcomed rebels, outsiders, and assistants looking for a chance, and it carries none of the Ozu nostalgia for a disappearing Japanese paradise that his team produced at Shochiku. It is a rare movie for its date in that it suggests that the old Japan and the new,  particularly the new kind of woman, are not really at war with each other and can co-exist and meld together into a still happy whole.

Perhaps the oddest aspect of the story is that the father doesn’t seem to be concerned about the relationships. He doesn’t understand why young people would want to live in dirty Tokyo when they could live here in lovely scenic Nara, but the fact that both girls run away in the night and no one has mentioned, much less performed, an actual wedding of any kind for either young woman seems not to bother him at all. He just seems to assume that all that will be taken care of eventually.

In her way, simply by being a female director Tanaka was the greatest of the movie rebels of the fifties, and it is no particular surprise that her second film ended up at Nikkatsu after the bruising battle she fought with Mizoguchi at Shochiku just to be given a chance behind the camera. The movie-making itself is not rebellious, certainly not in the way Love Letter had been. We get lots of Ozu-like shots of the town’s scenery between each scene and even a beautifully composed close-up or two of teacups or apples fallen on the floor, and we open and close with what initially seems a family religious service but is revealed to be a practice session in the proper recitation of Noh poetry. Between those shots there is nothing of the mature Ozu visible, no floor-level camera, no constant cutting back and forth in the dialogue scenes, etc.  Rather we have a movie told mostly in two-shots and medium shots.

The maid practices her lines

There may even be a Mizoguchi joke: Tanaka herself takes a comic cameo as a nervous housemaid, and the others in the scene for no reason direct her to go farther and farther away from the camera before she begins her bit.

What Tanaka seems to have supplied is warmth and charm, neither of which are often associated with late Ozu or Mizoguchi at any period. There is no coldness about the movie, despite the often distant camera. Interestingly, despite the romance, there are still no kisses; the most romantic gesture we see is a couple simply holding hands.

It’s hard to think of a movie as a feminist statement when the goal is to get all the young women married off. Nevertheless, by letting the women make their own choice, and by making the youngest of the lovers into the matchmaker, it was feminism in 1955 Japan (in the provinces, girls were still being openly sold by their families and in the towns many a bar girl or mistress was in fact working off a family debt, which amounted to the same thing, and arranged marriages purely for business purposes were still very common). Once you accept that Kitahara at 21 is acting like the girls of 14-15 in American movies, it is a warm, happy little comedy that will keep you entertained while still depicting a society in a major state of flux.

• * She actually looks far more like a teenaged girl than Sandra Dee did as Gidget, though Dee was really seventeen.