Review - She and He (1963)

Susumu Hani's little-seen 60's gem begins and ends, quite tellingly, with identical scenes; a pretty young woman lolls in bed next to her spouse, but rather than doze blissfully, she lies awake, visibly anxious. She is Naoko, a thoughtful (if somewhat naive) housewife living in the suburbs of Tokyo who is increasingly out of sync with her picturesque domestic surroundings. While her salaryman husband commutes to the city to make a respectable living and afford the finer things, she perfunctorily performs her household duties, secretly craving another existence, one dictated by her passionate nature and curiosity, not rigid societal norms. Shaking up her routine (and rattling her neighbors), she befriends and adopts two inhabitants of a nearby shantytown as a sort of surrogate family, a blind orphan girl and a gold-toothed ragpicker who was, in a past life, a college classmate of her husband. They may be downtrodden, but they possess a freedom and self-determination that Naoko lacks, and an ingenuousness that she relates to. Her attempt to reconcile her innocent worldview with their very real lives, however, is unsuccessful, and following a tragic final act, she plods back to the status quo.

While it functions as a critique of modern consumerist society on one level (and as a psuedo-neorealist document, complete with handheld camera work, on another), Hani's film feels personally invested, and he regards his heroine with a tender gaze that borders on adoration. When photographing locales, he displays an expressionist touch, portraying the sprawling apartment complex where the story takes place as chic and appealing in early scenes, then alien and maze-like when Naoko's angst reaches a fever pitch later. Much has been made of the stylistic similarities to the works of Michelangelo Antonioni, and while there are parallels in theme (a woman at odds with her environment) and aesthetics (the disdain for modern architecture), the Italian director scarcely depicted his female protagonists with this much warmth or compassion. Hani seems to want more for his wide-eyed leading lady, and though she basically ends up where she started, her ordeal is not trivialized. The time we spend following her, like the brief time Naoko spends with her surrogate family, is not wasted because things don't end well; it just requires a charmed outlook like hers to make any sense of it.