The Insect Woman - Nippon konchuki (1963) - Japanese - DVD9 - Eng Subs [DDR]

2014.01.08


The Insect Woman - Nippon konchuki (1963) Japanese - DVD9 - Eng Subs [DDR]

The Insect Woman (Nippon konchuki) is a 1963 Japanese film directed by Shohei Imamura.
It was entered into the 14th Berlin International Film Festival where Sachiko Hidari won the Silver Bear for Best Actress award

CAST:-
Emiko Aizawa – Rui
Masumi Harukawa – Midori
Sachiko Hidari – Tome Matsuki
Emiko Higashi – Kane
Daizaburo Hirata – Kamibayashi
Seizaburo Kawazu – Karasawa
Teruko Kishi – Rin
Tanie Kitabayashi – Madam
Kazuo Kitamura – Chuji
Asao Koike – Sawakichi
Masakazu Kuwayama – Owagawa En's Lover
Hiroyuki Nagato – Matsunami
Shoichi Ozawa – Ken
Sumie Sasaki – En
Taiji Tonoyama – Foreman
Shigeru Tsuyuguchi – Honda
Jitsuko Yoshimura – Nobuko

Directed by Shohei Imamura
Written by Keiji Hasebe, Shohei Imamura
Music by Toshiro Mayuzumi

MOVIE REVIEW:- The Insect Woman - Nippon konchuki (1963) Japanese
A woman, Tome, (Sachiko Hidari) is born to a lower-class family in Japan in 1918. The film is a metaphor for life in Japan through the middle twentieth century, including World War II.

The title refers to an insect, repeating its mistakes, as in an infinite circle. Imamura, with this metaphor, introduces the life of Tome, who keeps trying to change her poor life.

Amorality in Japan. Tome is born into poverty in rural Japan, in the late 1910s. Chuji, her father, dotes on her; her mother is less faithful. Tome becomes a neighbor's mistress, works at his mill as World War II rages, and has a daughter. After an affair with a mill supervisor, Tome goes to Tokyo to seek her fortune. She leaves the child, Nobuko, in Chuji's care. Tome's a maid at a brothel, learns trade from the madam, enjoys the protection of a businessman whose mistress she becomes, and is soon herself the boss. As Chuji ages and Nobuko grows up with her own ideas, can Tome's self-preserving schemes provide continued comfort? Or will the mice scamper over herThe Insect Woman covers 45 years in the life of long-suffering Japanese woman Tome Matsuki, played brilliantly by Sachiko Hidari. Thrust into the cold world at age 20, the pregnant Tome takes a factory job. She gives this up for the relative comfort of the life of an American GI's mistress. Once her American benefactor heads home, she seeks shelter in a house of prostitution, eventually becoming the Madam. Late in life, she is introduced to the daughter she'd abandoned years earlier, whose life has followed pretty much the same path as her mother's had. The winner of 14 Japanese film awards, The Insect Woman details the decline of cultural values as mirrored by one single misspent life.

The Insect Woman's title serves as an understandably Westernized paraphrase of the literal translation "Entymology of Japan," which would lead us to expect an educational nature documentary concerning beetles, spiders, silkworms and such. In the film's opening and closing scenes, Imamura draws a distinct parallel between the rudimentary behavior and lack of any overt teleological purpose (beyond mere survival) of more primitive organisms and what he chronicles in the life experience of his female protagonist Tome. It begins with a beetle scrabbling over some dirt, eventually slowing down and struggling as it tries to make its way up an incline (a small pile, perhaps just a few inches of elevation) only to see the granules slide out from underneath its skittering legs with each attempt to lunge forward. Likewise, Tome's final moments on film show her pressing forth, after a hard, cruel trudge through 45 years of life, up a steep hill, weary and with busted sandals, back to the impoverished mountain village in which she was born. In between the narrative frame provided by those seemingly futile ascents, we see select moments of her experience, from her dismal birth of questionable ancestry, the rude squalor of her early years as an innocent subjected to her father's dumb and brutal self-gratification, the functional role of sexual bargaining chip she plays as a young adult to alleviate pressure from her family's landlord, and her experiences during and after World War II in which she finds that life in the big city is no more respectful of her dignity than what she endured back in the village... assuming she ever had any higher aspirations to begin with.

Tome's birth, heralded by a staggering through the snow sequence reminiscent of Kobayashi's concluding (and life-ending) scene of the ten-hour epic The Human Condition, ushers us into the plight of relentless hardship and deprivation that she, and innumerable others like her, are born into and destined to remain. On her dismal meandering through the wreckage of mid-20th century Japan, Tome's environment changes as she leaves the benighted countryside for supposedly more civilized surroundings. She arrives at a level of relative material affluence, running her own business and profiting from the largess of a modestly prosperous (but cynically chauvinistic) benefactor. She even discovers religion (a more urbane cult of confession that dismisses the crude folk animism of her rural upbringing) and flatters herself with the idea that she's made a lasting and significant change for the better after openly admitting her sins and trying to make a clean break from her past - only to see all the improvements and achievements slip away, as she probably always expected they would. In all this, there's never really a point where she sees herself as defeated or without hope. She simply readjusts her shoulders to bear the burden that's laid upon her, and presses ahead.



TECHNICAL SPECIFICATIONS:-
Video Codec: MPEG-2
Video Bitrate: 4999 kbps
Video Resolution: 720x480
Video Aspect Ratio: 1.333:1
Frames Per Second: 23.976
Audio Codec: AC3
Audio Bitrate: 192kb/s CBR 48000 Hz
Audio Streams: 2
Audio Languages:Japanese
RunTime 123 mins
Subtitles: English
Ripped by: Trinidad [DDR]
Duration: 123 mins