Following on from Apart From You, Naruse returns to his exploration of working class women struggling to get by in a male dominated world in Every-Night Dreams (夜ごとの夢, Yogoto no Yume) also released in 1933. This time we meet weary bar hostess Omitsu who has a young son she’s raising alone after her deadbeat husband ran out on them a few years previously.
Omitsu doesn’t particularly like working in the bar, but as her mama-san grudgingly admits, she is quite good at it. She’s a modern woman who can drink and smoke and flirt to keep the guys buying drinks and wanting more though she’s finding it increasingly difficult to deflect some of the more intense interest such as that from a sleazy boat captain that her boss is eager to keep happy. Whilst at work, her son is looked after by a kindly older couple in her building who urge her to find a nicer line of business or get married again to a more reliable man.
The gentle rhythms of her life are disrupted when her long absent husband finally reappears. After first rejecting him outright, Omitsu eventually relents and lets him back into her life. However, despite his seemingly sincere pledges to change, get a proper job, start being a proper husband and father, Mizuhara fails to achieve any of his aims and also becomes increasingly jealous about Omitsu’s job at the bar. When their son, Fumio, is injured in an accident and requires expensive medical treatment, events reach a tragic climax.
Naruse would return to women alone facing a difficult economic future in many of his films but Omitsu’s situation is only made worse by the ongoing depression. Realistically speaking, there are few lines of work available to a woman in Omitu’s position and the more well regarded of them probably wouldn’t pay enough to allow her to keep both herself and her son, even as it stands she tries to borrow money from the bar to “reward” the older couple who watch Fumio while she’s working (though of course they wouldn’t take it). Omitsu herself feels there’s something degrading about her work and when her friend advises her to remarry, she exclaims any man worth a damn would run from a woman like her. Unfortunately, she may, in some senses, be right.
The man she ended up with, Mizuhara, is most definitely not worth a damn. It’s not entirely his fault he can’t find work – he does look for it and appears to want to find a job but in this difficult economic environment there’s not much going. Applying at factory, he’s turned down almost on sight because he’s a weedy sort of guy and doesn’t look like he’s cut out for physical labour. His inability to get ahead and provide for his wife and child sends him into a kind of depression and self esteem crisis which has him thinking about leaving again, especially as his increasing jealousy threatens his wife’s bar job which is their only form of income (whether he likes it or not). Fumio’s accident forces his hand into a series of bad decisions taken for a good reason but which again only cause more trouble for his family.
Naruse is a little flashier here than in Apart From You using canted angles, faster editing and even more zooms to hint at the panic felt by Omitsu in the increasingly distressing situations she finds herself in. Like the train accident in Flunky, Work Hard, the news that Fumio has been hit by a car is delivered in an expressionistic style beginning with his father putting down the boy’s toy car as a troupe of kids arrive and the screen is stabbed with a series of rapidly edited, alternating angle shots of intertitles mingled with the shocked reaction of the parents and the other children. If Naruse felt compelled to provide an ending with some sort of hint of far off promise in previous films, here he abandons that altogether as Omitsu laments her sad fate and instructs her son to grow up strong, not like his father, but like the mother who is doing everything she can to ensure his life won’t always be like this.
Every-Night Dreams is the fourth of five films included in Criterion’s Eclipse Series 26: Silent Naruse box set.
