Popular reviews

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  Review by Lumenal ★★★★★ 90

  I've now watched Mikio Naruse's Yearning twice, and I'm hard pressed to say which of Naruse's later masterpieces is the greatest. Yearning is certainly a candidate. Like his other later films, he explores repressed love, unrealized love, love that is simply impossible.

  Hideko Takamine once again delivers a beautiful performance of emotion and restraint. It seems she can convey nearly anything with the tiniest movement of her eyelids or pupils. It was said that she and Naruse would sit down with the script prior to filming, and they would go through the dialog, crossing out lines when it was determined she could simply convey the meaning with facial expressions.

  While love is the dominant theme of Yearning, it also touches…

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  Review by Richard Chandler ★★★★½ 15

  "That's exactly how I wanted to live my life."

  Nearly two decades removed from World War II, the life of a virtuous war-widow (Hideko Takamine) is poignantly reshaped by anomic social trends, the encroachment of corporatism and an unforeseen confession from her younger brother-in-law (Yūzō Kayama).

  Though biographical details remain fairly scant regarding the notably reticent Mikio Naruse—even his most frequent collaborators knew little about him personally—it is at least known that he was orphaned in adolescence and came of age in dire poverty. At fifteen he stumbled into the film industry via a menial position at Shochiku's Kamata studios, where he worked for roughly a decade in various capacities before finally beginning a prolific directorial career in 1930. His…

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  Review by Will Sloan

  Watched this and thought about how life is precious, difficult, and very easy to just piss away.

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  Review by allain ★★★★★ 5

  Specifically rewatched this film tonight because I remembered Koji and how he loved someone who unfortunately cannot reciprocate his feelings wholeheartedly. Felt the same way for some time now, but unlike him, I know when to end my anguish and suffering. 

  Also, hi. Did you miss me?

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  Review by Sally Jane Black

  Obviously, Koji is the one the title refers to. He spends his life in love with an unattainable person, and it costs him so much. He hides it in booze and gambling and trysts, but his is a life of agony. But it is also as much about Reiko and her love for her dead husband, and her determination--a kind of yearning with better PR--in keeping the shop open. Naruse set the film in a time of change, using the small business vs. big backdrop, it seems, to contextualize yearning also with both greed (yearning for material wealth) and nostalgia (yearning for better times). It resides in every facet of this film, from the characters, the setting, the plot. The…

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  Review by Edgar Cochran ✝️ ★★★★★ 4

  Paradoxically, Hideko Takamine impersonates an alternate life of her character in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960): Reiko Morita is currently a widow who once married a 22-year-old man back when she was 19. The war bombing destroyed his family's shop and the widow decides to rebuild it for the love she had towards her husband and the respect she had for his mother. The film opens in present time, that is, eighteen years after the bombing, when the shop is being currently run by the husband's family, including the conspiring sisters of his brother-in-law who want to get rid of Reiko.

  Behold, once again, Takamine's mournful widow condition under critical emotional and economic circumstances: she still loves her…

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  Review by comrade_yui ★★★★★ 1

  between naruse, mizoguchi and ozu, i'm quickly learning that no one makes punishing, mind-shattering melodramas quite like the japanese. such a tremendously powerful ending, i dare anyone not to cry.

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  Review by Graham 4

  Yearning is a beautifully complex working class drama that spends its runtime predominantly focussed on the life of Reiko [Hideko Takamine], a young war-widow, and her time holding her late husband's family's store together in the post-war commercial uprising.

  In some ways this feels entirely of the classic Japanese ilk of Ozu or Kobayashi, yet in others it is entirely different, The cinematics, framing and family based drama is very familiar indeed and a joy to watch, and is paired with the unusual and unsettling melancholy of a score that pushes the narrative along like the very best post-war European noir.

  By focusing on character nuance and this specific time in Japanese history, director Mikio Naruse created a glorious sensory experience from what seems on the surface to be a meat and potatoes family drama. This is my first of his films and I'm intrigued to see more.

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  Review by Sin ✊🏿 ★★★★½ 14

  Dammit, Naruse. Goddammit! Someone please take my heart, I don't want it anymore. This debilitating, agonizing pain in my heart won't go away. 💔 💔 💔

  Hideko Takamine once again delivers a standout performance. Seriously, her range is vast and spectacular and seemingly effortless. She plays a widow (Reiko) who remains loyal to her late husband's family by single-handedly maintaining/running their mom-and-pop grocery business. She is fully devoted to the family on every conceivable level.

  Reiko is someone that you instinctively root for. You can't help but be invested in her winning given her compassion, self-sacrifice, and life circumstances. This is why you also can't help but feel pangs of distress as Reiko navigates the "slow death" of the way…

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  Review by Arsaib Gilbert ★★★★★

  [Favorites of 1960s]

  At one point during the remarkable train sequence late in the film—this elliptically poetic episode runs approximately nine minutes, considerably longer than what I had imagined from my initial viewings—Takamine Hideko's character forlornly looks at her brother-in-law, sitting fast asleep across from her, with tears in her eyes. Though emotions end up getting the better of her, and she wakes him in the process, but not before she had made an important, life-altering decision, as we later discover. This is an example of something purely emotional or sentimental not hindering the psychological in Naruse Mikio’s cinema, applying equally to both the writing and the filmmaking.

  [Please read the full review @ Film The Madman]

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  Naruse Mikio — Top 30
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  Review by Bruno Andrade ★★★★★ 7

  Muitos anos depois dos filmes dos anos 1930, no outro pólo de sua carreira, no chamado segundo período de declínio dos anos 1960, Naruse realizava Midareru, um de seus últimos filmes (1964). O cineasta taiwanês Edward Yang encontrou nesse filme uma nova oportunidade de expressar sua admiração por esse cineasta[1], focando especialmente na última cena. Ele notou ali, com trinta anos de distância, um gesto comparável em todos os sentidos ao que descrevemos em Kimi to wakarete e Otome-gokoro - Sannin-shimai. Reiko, uma viúva de guerra há quinze anos e ainda jovem, encontra-se em uma aldeia nas montanhas com seu cunhado Koji, doze anos mais novo. Ele declarou no início do filme que a amava há muito tempo. A princípio…

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  Review by Jerry McGlothlin ★★★½ 7

  The heart trapped between glimpses past and a fleeting present, maintaining a practiced, close veneer of stoicism in the face of constant shifts before eyes that tumefy from holding back the tears of decades. Our souls sometimes reflect the state of reality around us; frequently in flux, hoping for what lies ahead to prove conducive to nourishment, while clinging tightly (always) to something that will never show its familiar face again.