Wife! Be Like a Rose! (Mikio Naruse, 1935)

If one wanted to embark on a post-structuralist analysis of Naruse, I'd submit that Wife! Be Like a Rose! would be a fantastic place to start. Traversed by numerous ideological double-binds, this film explicitly affirms patriarchy and female servitude while disrupting that idea at every turn. As Cahiers famously write about Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln, this is a "cracking text." (It's also Naruse's most significant film that doesn't appear to exist in a restored form, but that's neither here nor there.)

Kimiko (Sachiko Chiba) is a diligent office worker in Tokyo. Equally at ease in a kimono or a smart business suit, Kimiko is the model of a modern Japanese woman. And her relationship with fiance Seiji (Heihachirō Ōkawa) seems to be a union of equals. As Dan Sallitt notes in his analysis, there's a screwballish repartee between the two of them, a gentle oneupmanship of good-natured digs and jibes. Meanwhile, Kimiko supports her mother Etsuko (Tomoko Īto), a melancholic introvert and published poet who craves solitude while pining away for her husband Shunsaku (Sadao Maruyama) from whom she is separated.

The plot is instigated by patriarchal tradition. Seiji's father wants to meet Kimiko's father to formalize their engagement. But Shunsaku has moved to the country and formed another family; he has not returned home to visit Kimiko or Etsuko in nearly twenty years. The members of family #1 consider themselves to have been abandoned, not without reason, and Kimiko must go the countryside to "retrieve" her father.

Naruse, working from a play by Minoru Nakano, shows Kimiko and Seiji making fun of Etsuko's unpleasant, antisocial behavior, arguing that the father left home because she was a bad wife. Kimiko has a brief monologue in the backseat of a cab, articulating all the womanly duties a good wife should fulfill, asserting that she will be a much better wife than her mother ever was. At the same time, the characters clearly resent Shunsaki for skipping out, although they tend to blame it on his new wife Oyuki (Yuriko Hanabusa), as if she had bewitched the poor rube with her evil wiles.

Wife! keeps exhibiting a desire to be modern. Naruse clearly shows that Kimiko's parents are terribly suited for one another, and despite all the protestations, they are just two decent people who wanted different things from life. But the overt text of the film cannot accommodate this no-fault perspective. Naruse shows Shunsaki as a man in late middle age who has abjured available office work so he can pan for gold in the river, day after day. He's a loser, essentially, refusing to give up his pipe dreams and provide. But he never receives open criticism; that's reserved for Etsuko, the "unwifely" poet. 

Even the title suggests Naruse is aware of this contradiction. The injunction to be a good wife is articulated with a rose, a flower that is almost a poetic cliche. So Etsuko is supposed to be demure, but her poetic nature is simultaneously affirmed. Kimiko finds that her father's new wife is a kind, decent woman; she is supporting the family, lets Shunsaki dick around with his gold panning, and has been responsible for what little contact her husband has maintained with his old family. And Kimiko sees that this is what makes him happy. And although the film asserts Etsuko's inability to move on from Shunsaki, we see that she doesn't really like him. He serves best as a literary trope for loss, and the poet may be happiest when wallowing in her own misery.

Naruse's labor on the play's text isn't just about characterization either. Wife! is aggressively formalist, employing low, Constructivist-style shots of Kimiko against the city skyline (cf. Cindy Sherman's "film stills"), oblique compositions, and an Ozu-on-steroids tendency to bisect or compartmentalize the frame. Wife! also features some of Naruse's most unusual tracking shots, the camera gliding along banisters and interior passageways for no apparent reason. Even when Kimiko leaves vertical Tokyo for the horizontal countryside, Naruse's deep focus and halting maneuvers around buildings suggests an overactive spatial intelligence, working far in excess of what the film ostensibly requires.

Put another way, Wife! Be Like a Rose! is a high-modernist inscription of outdated values, its cinematic substrate complicating, if not ever really negating, its manifest messages. Even Kimiko's third-act reluctance to let her father go back home is clipped and artificial, a potential conflict resolved with a gift of oranges and a chocolate bar. Nothing works like it's supposed to, resulting in a melodrama with the wheels off, the sort of scheming Douglas Sirk would perfect a few decades later. And, as it happens, Naruse's final film suggests that the Japanese master eventually noticed Sirk, and took his lessons to heart.