Throughout the year, institutions around the world have been celebrating the 120th birthday of the writer and director Mikio Naruse. These extensive and essential retrospectives have afforded audiences an opportunity to experience both the dazzling breadth of this prolific filmmaker’s work—much of it still, unfortunately, unavailable on disc or streaming—and his remarkable thematic consistency across more than 90 films. Naruse’s career begins at the end of the silent era and concludes in the 1960s, amidst the tumult of the Japanese New Wave. All the while, he returns to stories that follow the fraught course of romance and, specifically, the prescribed reality of women in modern Japan.
The little-screened Sudden Rain (1956), written by regular Naruse collaborator Yôko Mizuki from an original story by New Theater proponent Kunio Kishida, comes from what is arguably the director’s best-loved period—the 1950s run that produced such bona fide classics as Late Chrysanthemums (1954), Floating Clouds (1955), and Flowing (1956). One of the four films Naruse made with the immortal Setsuko Hara, Sudden Rain deploys mordant comedy in a quietly poignant tale of an already bad situation gradually becoming worse.
Hara is in her fourth unhappy year of marriage to burned-out makeup salesman Shûji Sano, whose malaise is so profound he literally can’t stomach much. They bicker and clash on matters big and small—“We didn’t get married to go out,” he retorts at the suggestion of even a modest excursion. She clips recipes from the newspaper but finds their budget can’t accommodate the needed ingredients, let alone the new toaster and wooden clogs she covets—though she does allow herself some roasted yam from a street vendor.
Spanning several wintry Sundays, all portrayed with palpable lassitude, Sudden Rain is more than an exegesis on the discontents of marriage. Doubles and parallels surface—a younger couple moves in next door, a niece suddenly shows up and recounts her thwarted honeymoon—while a lively ensemble of townsfolk and work colleagues fleshes out a boisterous universe around the couple. A film of interruptions worthy of its title—the eponymous shower is depicted to evocative sky-darkening effect—Sudden Rain shows how the course of life, be it in a day, in a marriage, or in a moment, is never stagnant. Concluding with one last disruption, this time involving an impromptu game, Sudden Rain leaves us with disarming ambiguity about how chance shapes life’s journey. Things fall apart; life goes on.
Sudden Rain screens this Sunday, November 30, at BAMPFA on 35mm as part of the series Mikio Naruse: The Auteur as Salaryman.
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