Keiko Kishi has a loving, bantering relationship with her younger brother, Hiroshi Kawaguchi. He's wild and unfocused, always running up bills, which she pays. Their father, Masayuki Mori, says it's just youthful spirits and he'll grow out of it. Their stepmother, Kinuyo Tanaka, is whiny and self-pitying, a Christian of the most annoying type, sluffing off her responsibilities and laying the burden on Jesus and the daughter, who cleans the house, runs the household and errands, and tries to look after her brother. Then Hiroshi comes down with tuberculosis, and everything stops stock still.
Kon Ichikawa's drama about the stress of dealing with a changing society in 1920s Japan is well executed, but I find it not particularly because, well, what society is not going through changes at all times? The societal differences in Japan in the 1920s -- when this movie is set -- make everyone look old-fashioned by the standards of the year it was produced, but it seems to be more a matter of nostalgic soap opera distancing and diminishing its impact.
The most interesting aspect of this movie is a technical one. It uses the technique of bleach bypass, also known as skip bleach, to achieve a darker, heavier look, with little or none of the silver removed in the interpositive stage of print production. This technique had been pioneered at Daiei, where this movie was produced. It wasn't until Roger Deakins used parallel techniques in 1984. that western film makers stood up and noticed. Modern variations have since become a standard for films set in the 1920s, mimicking pre-1944 Technicolor.
