Thursday, June 26 at 6:00 PM – Gene Siskel Film Center — 164 N State Street
Tickets: $13 at the door or purchase in advance
LIGHTNING
Directed by Mikio Naruse • 1952
In Japanese with English subtitles
You’ve never met a more cheerful urban ambassador than Kiyoko (Hideko Takamine), who works as a tour guide on a bus and spends her days airily comparing the sights and sounds of postwar Tokyo to the old-world charms of Paris. Unencumbered by marriage, children, or professional anxiety, Kiyoko is obviously living her best life — and yet everyone in her family wonders when she’s going to settle down with the right man. Her mother, who’s been married and divorced four times and had a child with each husband, suggests (and suggests and suggests again) the local baker as a suitor with squarely “good enough” appeal. Both of Kiyoko’s sisters attest to the pleasures of coupledom, despite much evidence to the contrary. Kiyoko laughs it all off, breezily informing any interlocutor that men are just terrible. (Luckily, she can readily cite the example of her ne’er-do-well brother, with his slovenly, unshaven legs and his meager pachinko parlor winnings.) Adapted from a novel by Fumiko Hayashi, whose hardscrabble, lower middle class milieu was brought to the screen six times by Mikio Naruse, Lightning is an unassuming marvel, a work that teeters on the edge of romantic comedy but never succumbs. Kinema Junpo magazine declared it the second-best Japanese film of 1952 behind only Kurosawa’s Ikiru, but Lightning, along with the rest of Naruse’s postwar output, did not get distributed in the US and remains undeservedly obscure. Like its heroine, Lightning simply engages with the world, avoids shunting its characters into ready-made boxes, and looks over the horizon for fleeting release. (KW)
87 min • Daiei Studios • 35mm from the Japan Foundation, permission Kadokawa
Preceded by: “Safety on Our School Bus (Second Edition)” (Encyclopedia Britannica Films, 1980) – 12 min – 16mm
NEXT UP: A STORY OF FLOATING WEEDS on July 5 at the Music Box