She and He

She and He

1963. Japan. Directed by Susumu Hani. Screenplay by Kunio Shimizu, Hani. With Sachiko Hidari, Kikuji Yamashita, Eiji Okada. Although he is incontestably one of postwar Japanese cinema’s most innovative and influential filmmakers, Hani’s work is unjustly neglected today. His second feature film is a finely etched, feminist study of a young modern woman (Hidari) who is restless in her marriage to a salaryman. The couple live in a shining new apartment building on a hill overlooking a slum. The wife finds herself strangely drawn to a rag-picker who lives down below in a tin shack with a blind child and a dog, and the sheltering comforts of her middle-class existence inexorably fall away. Print lent by The Japan Foundation; courtesy Iwanami Audio-Visual Media Ltd. 114 min.