Tuesday, June 17 @ 7:00 PM / Music Box Theatre — 3733 N Southport Ave
Tickets: $11 at the door or purchase in advance
WHEN A WOMAN ASCENDS THE STAIRS
Directed by Mikio Naruse • 1960
In Japanese with English subtitles
At thirty, a single woman ponders: Is it time to get married? Or is it time to open a bar? Tragically, she’ll need a man to do either in Naruse’s slinky, sharp ode to a modern woman living a life fit for the Stone Age. Keiko (Hideko Takamine) — or as everyone calls her, Mama — considers her limited options as she climbs the defeating, seemingly endless stairs up to her dead-end hostess job at a Ginza bar. She’s surrounded by sleazy, unreliable men (suitors that don’t suit her) and hates alcohol. However, her stylish apartment is expensive. Naruse, one of the great chroniclers of women’s labor and lives, creates an unsentimental yet quietly devastating depiction of a woman with all the potential in the world and none of the funding. But the movie never feels too bleak: the film is modern and assured, a matter-of-fact story told in a hazy, dimly lit room to the sound of clinking glasses and Toshiro Mayuzumi’s jazz-tinged score. The artistic collaboration between Naruse and Takamine spanned three decades and resulted in seventeen movies. In them, Takamine portrayed women with all kinds of jobs — hostess, bus conductor, novelist, grocery store manager, wife — subsisting in a world created by men. Often, they are women who lack — whether upward mobility, familial support, education, money, or friends. With actual independence shapeless and just out of reach, what is Keiko to do? She takes it one step at a time. (RIN)
111 min • Toho • 35mm from the Japan Foundation, permission Janus
Preceded by: “Holiday Magic” (Heather McAdams, 1985) – 7 min – 16mm
“Holiday Magic” has been preserved by Chicago Film Society with the support of the National Film Preservation Foundation
NEXT UP: LIGHTNING on Thursday, June 26 at the Film Center