Shirô Kanemitsu has graduated from law school and is on his way back to the small village he was born in. All the gossip is about which of the local girls he is to wed. His choice is Hiroko Kawasaki, but she turns him down, because she loves her cousin, Mitsugu Fujii. He is in love with the girl Kanemitsu winds up marrying, so Miss Kawasaki and he skedaddle to Tokyo. There they do well for a while, but a financial crisis overwhelms their employers; Fujii winds up driving a taxi, and Miss Kawasaki becomes a bar girl, and eventually sinks lower.
Hiroshi Shimizu's movie is about the rootlessness of modern life, the lack of a framework to support the individual in crisis. In the small village where all this starts, there is family and friends and an organization for every group of individuals. In Tokyo, beautiful though it appears, there is only the desperate rush of money and it is necessary for survival, no matter it's cost. The village becomes a distant dream for the two leads, each anxiously enquiring for news. Yonekazu Wakita's set design emphasizes this. Notice the spare decorations of the city scenes, while those set in the country are comfortably and comfortingly cluttered with the accumulation of generations.
Hiroshi Shimizu's movie is about the rootlessness of modern life, the lack of a framework to support the individual in crisis. In the small village where all this starts, there is family and friends and an organization for every group of individuals. In Tokyo, beautiful though it appears, there is only the desperate rush of money and it is necessary for survival, no matter it's cost. The village becomes a distant dream for the two leads, each anxiously enquiring for news. Yonekazu Wakita's set design emphasizes this. Notice the spare decorations of the city scenes, while those set in the country are comfortably and comfortingly cluttered with the accumulation of generations.
