A Film Canon

One of the key works in Naruse's formulation of a quintessentially Japanese melodrama, Repast partakes of the domesticity, but not the sublimity, of Ozu's filmic universe, such that the (already tentative) lineage between post-war nuclear family and pre-war extended family is finally broken, producing a series of individuals who simply happen to live in the same household and, more specifically, a universe of women completely jettisoned from both tradition and futurity, as evinced in their inevitable alienation from their children, or their children's generation. To this end, Naruse prioritises those idiosyncratic connections - in this case between Hatsunosuke (Ken Uehara) and his niece (Yukiko Shimazaki) - whose ostensible testament to the adaptive power of sympathy merely masks the deeper dislocation experienced by wife Michiyo (Setsuko Hara), the centrepiece of the film. Similarly, his tendency to shoot segments of dialogue separately increases the sense of isolation, as does the claustrophobic treatment of the family home, whose omnipresent bars and shutters ensure that every venture beyond it takes on the character of tourism, and any attempt to escape remains futile, incorporated into the re-identification with it that concludes the narrative, and whose hysterial overtones are contained so as to poetically clarify the pervasive lack of that catharsis which is the rationale for American melodrama.