Yearning

With its hopping street life, whirring motor scooters, vibes music, and nihilist hero, Yearning could almost be mistaken for a film by one of Japan’s New Wave generation. Enter war widow Hideko Takamine—no longer young but still youthful with unresolved yearning. This film’s beautiful tension between old and new, melodrama and New Wave anti-melodrama, begins to emerge as our heroine struggles to keep her mom-and-pop store afloat and protect her alcoholic brother-in-law. In resolving his heroine’s dilemma, caught between duty and passion, Mikio Naruse resolves his own, coming down on the side of tragic grace.