Daughters, Wives, and a Mother

The writer and critic Susan Sontag was a great admirer of this drama about a middle-class Tokyo family thrown into crisis by a car accident and an insurance windfall. A splendid cast (including Tatsuya Nakadai) carries off a film of narrative complexity, appropriately shot in CinemaScope. “Another film in which [Mikio] Naruse compares the ideal of life—what the characters suppose themselves to be living—with its reality. . . . Again and again in Naruse’s films, the internal coherence of the family is an illusion that’s exposed the moment a crisis loosens the bonds among the family members” (Chris Fujiwara, Film Comment).