Mr. Shosuke Ohara

Based on an archetypal Japanese character of a rich man who eats, drinks, and squanders away his family fortune, Mr. Shosuke Ohara is a village comedy of manners with a surprisingly elegiac edge, fitting for the postwar 1949 climate, where, in the words of the main character, “times have changed.” A reluctant inheritor of fortune, the kindly Shosuke-san actually seems less a village drunk than a radical redistributor of wealth, funding everything from a village baseball team to sewing machines to help women enter the workforce. Fortune dissipating, he borrows to promptly give away, until—as another haunting Hiroshi Shimizu tracking shot reveals—hardly anything remains. Alone in the rain, our hero surveys what was once his. “The prestige that lasted for generations is a burden for me. It meant something in the old days, but times have changed. It means nothing anymore.”