Like the opening dichotomous image of the wooden poles stuck in water and their wavering reflections, there is an impending doom haunting the impeccable unity from Naruse’s great-as-usual narrative instincts and dramaturgy. Similar to The Whole Family Works, the film’s progression seems to be dictated by passage of days itself instead of specific plot elements. What’s different is that there is not really a central dilemma acting as the fulcrum of the selected scenes that captures the lives of this particular social unit, a house of geishas. Each person within this unit carries overlapping strands of drama – the daughter played by Takamine wanting to meet his father, the relative of Namie intruding the house, the mother taking care of her ill daughter, the mistress of the house deciding on if she should sell the house, etc.. – that are either unfulfilled, resolved offscreen, or resolved with a giant asterisk that signals future instability.
It’s quite remarkable how Naruse manages to catch the narrative up to events that occurred completely offscreen through minute character behaviours. For example, the first time Rika encounters Ohama is also the first time Ohama is introduced in the film. It’s presented through a short-lasting medium shot where expositions from Rika’s two companions introduce who Ohama is to both Rika and the audience. We do not see the two officially interact until a handful of scenes later, yet the behaviours of the two and the brief dialogue expositions make it perfectly sensible that they have had a meaningful interaction offscreen.
It’s unjustifiable and ultimately dumb to claim any of Naruse’s films out of his prolific career to be his best work, but what he does on this film is exemplary of his brilliance as a filmmaker to me. “The world that betrays us”, a term from Naruse’s most frequently cited quote, is reflected in his cinema through one of its most pivotal elements, which is time. In one scene you see a geisha drunkenly storming out of the house and in another, some months later, coming back and apologizing with utter sincerity. Our words and actions in the moments are always so meagre when face against the constant flow where they will inevitably be supplanted by another words and actions that will contradict. It is this stream of events and effects that accrues through this abstract measurement of time that invariably trouble us with the world’s impermanence while simultaneously traps us within the stagnancy of the moment and all its inexorable, inveterate dogmas. The haunting final scene functions so well because of the equilibrium Naruse manages to establish this whole time, through the master control of time that makes what occurs onscreen and offscreen feel at one, that the final insinuation of doom feels inevitable.
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