AKA: Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki
Country and Year: Japan (1960)
Director: Mikio Naruse
Starring: Hideko Takamine, Tatsuya Nakadai, Reiko Dan, Masayuki Mori, Daisuke Sato

Review By: David Austin
Rating: 4 out of 4 stars (great)

Toshiro Mayuzumi’s cool, jazzy xylophone score grabs you right from the beginning, suggesting delicacy, and caprice, and calling to mind existential French New Wave essentials like Elevator to the Gallows. Soon it morphs into something lusher, loungier. It’s a perfect overture to When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, which takes us deep into the floating world of the Ginza night clubs - the milieu in which Keiko, known to all respectfully as “Mama,” plies her trade as a bar hostess. While the bars put on an opulent and decadent façade, it doesn’t take long before Naruse’s camera delves into the lives of the people behind the surface – an early shot pans up from a man on the street to a laughing group of women in the closed bar, making it clear where Naruse’s interest lies. It also does not take long before we see the cold business side of these richly decked-out birdhouses. Mama says it best early in the film: “Bars in the daytime are like women with no makeup.”

The hostess club phenomenon has always been something a little unfamiliar to the West, where the word geisha still incorrectly conjures up thoughts of prostitution. Hostesses may be a poor, distant cousin to the geisha, but they too are as much entertainer as courtesan. Men - wealthy men and men on expense accounts (I certainly couldn’t afford to visit such places as an student living in Tokyo, settling for the grungier college bars in Takadanobaba and Kabukicho) – visit these exclusive clubs and pay a great deal to be made to feel charming and witty, and just a little bit wanted, by beautiful women, who in turn make their living from the money the clients bring into the bar. The relationship most often remains platonic, and the women are not prostitutes, but sex, or more precisely the hope of sex, is most definitely in the air, and the actual event itself is not unknown.

Our introduction to this world is through Mama, played superbly by Naruse’s muse, the lovely Hideko Takamine. Mama is a widow who works as a hostess in order to support herself, and her freeloading mother and brother. She’s a beautiful woman, and desirable enough to men to be a draw, but she is reaching an age where she will have to either marry or start her own bar. She may be a star, but this is a highly competitive world – one protégé who was willing to “go all out” (which Mama is not) already owns her own bar and steals Mama’s customers, and another, Junko (Reiko Dan, Red Beard) is fast on her heels. She is old fashioned – she still wears a kimono while one of her competitors pointedly dresses in the Western style, and carefully puts off her clients’ advances.

Mama’s problem, as with all the hostesses, is money. The need for money and the power of money pervade the film. The businessman clients have more than enough to do what they want, and no one else can get enough. Money intrudes in every aspect of life. Mama’s mother resents her for keeping an apartment and having nice clothes, but it is all part of an image that is necessary for success. A sickbed visit from the bar’s owner is a none-too-subtle hint that business waits. Even at a funeral, creditors show up to present their demands and pleadings to the bereaved.

Money is not sexualized, instead sex is monetized. Mr. Goda, a rich client of Mama’s, makes his proposal as frankly as if he were in a boardroom proposing a merger. He will finance Mama’s bar, be her patron, if she will be his mistress when he is in town. Mama’s response is that she will consider it. It’s not that far-fetched to imagine her lawyer going over the terms. It is a remarkably frank attitude - business-like salaciousness.

While Naruse’s style is not flashy, and the plot is not inherently fascinating (on paper anyway, all of the cliché elements of a “women’s picture” are present – gossip, marriage, aging, affairs, beauty salons), Naruse crafts a delicate character study whose impeccable composition, acting and direction transcend what could have been trite material. Moreover, he maintains pace and interest without ever resorting to melodrama or theatrics. It does not hurt that he had a stellar cast at his disposal. In addition to Takamine, Naruse gets a great performance out of an extremely young Tatsuya Nakadai, just a few years before Nakadai’s star-making roles in Kurosawa’s Yojimbo and Sanjuro, and Kobayashi’s Harakiri. Nakadai plays the bar manager at Mama’s clubs, quietly obsessed with her, and infuses his character with subtly disquieting elements. Her other swains are equally memorable, including tall, dark and handsome Fujisaki, played by Masayuki Mori (Ugetsu, Rashomon), and Sekine, played by round-faced, impish Daisuke Sato (Seven Samurai, Yojimbo).

However, it is through the character of Mama that the difference between Naruse and Ozu, the contemporary to whom he is most frequently compared, comes out. While Ozu’s works are fundamentally ensemble pieces, Takamine’s Mama is the beating emotional heart of When a Woman Ascends. While Ozu’s characters are resigned to their fates, Mama, in her own way, tries to make what she can of the world. She’s not a saint – she may bail out her brother but she resents it, she abstains but not happily. The titular stairs are those leading up to the job that she hates – at one point she changes bars, but while her narration states that “I went to work in a new bar,” the voice plays over an image of another staircase.

I must confess, When a Woman Ascends is my first experience with Naruse and it was a revelation. Long heralded as the unknown master of Japanese cinema (unknown in the West anyway), Naruse has been undergoing a renaissance of sorts in recent years with a traveling retrospective, an extensive DVD collection in the UK, and finally, with Criterion’s release of When a Woman Ascends, the first legitimate release in the United States (see Midnight Eye’s recent brief overview here for more on Naruse’s career). It’s truly a quiet masterpiece, and I look forward to seeing more.

Recommended? Absolutely, this is a classic in every sense of the word. Keep an eye out for Naruse’s homages to two other classics of feminine yearning, Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria and Powell and Pressburger’s Black Narcissus.

If you like this, you might like: Pale Flower, Nippon Konchuki (Insect Woman), Imitation of Life, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, Tokyo Story, Ikiru, Floating Weeds, Veronika Voss, Nights of Cabiria

DVD DETAILS

DVD Production Company: Criterion Collection ( www.criterionco.com)
Release Date: February 20, 2007
Run Time: 111 Mins
Extras: Donald Richie commentary, Liner Essays, Tatsuya Nakadai interview, Trailer

Criterion has released When a Woman Ascends onto Region 1 DVD in a lush 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen print. Picture quality is excellent, as are the sound quality and the subtitles. Included in the package is an original trailer and liner notes with several essays, by film scholars Audie Bock and Catherine Russell, critic Phillip Lopate, and actress Hideko Takamine. By far the most interesting (not to slight the others), is Takamine’s reserved but affecting recollection about her days working with Naruse.

The most significant extra is an excellent commentary track by Donald Richie, the eminence gris of Japanese film studies. Richie is pleasure to listen to - with his storyteller voice and personal reaction to the material, he transcends the usual dry scholarly commentary. Little time is wasted and blank patches are rare – it is obvious that Richie has done his homework and he comes equipped with a tremendous amount of knowledge about Naruse, the actors and actresses he worked with, and the subject matter of the film.

Finally, there is a 13 minute interview with Tatsuya Nakadai in which he discusses his experiences working with Naruse and Takamine as a young actor just moving from the stage to the screen.

© David Austin