Even the most highly regarded films won't meet with equal favor among all comers. I think this is quite fine, but it doesn't make any particular impression. 'Suzaki Paradise: Red light district' is easy on the eyes, with lovely, fetching filming locations, production design and art direction, costume design, hair, and makeup. Takamura Kurataro's cinematography is crisp and vivid, and possibly the top highlight for how vibrant the presentation is in turn; this is beautifully shot. The cast give strong performances, including Aratama Michiyo, Mihashi Tatsuya, Ashikawa Izumi, and so on. And there are strong themes at play in the storytelling of obsession between men and women - or really, possessiveness and jealousy, and demanding selfishness - and how it can get in the way of earnest living. Only, it seems to me that that storytelling and those themes are applied unevenly. And there's the rub.

In the first place, there is constant back and forth in the narrative as Yoshiji and Tsutae have near misses as they look for each other, and even as the movie plays with solid notions, it comes across less as a meaningful drama and more as a middling melodrama. Manabe Riichiro's milquetoast elevator music only reinforces that vibe. Secondly, for the majority of the length the plot centers the unfocused anger of Yoshiji as he flounders and seems to harbor ill feelings toward Tsutae's mobility. Amidst illustrations of other couples or individuals who share traits similar to the core pair, we eventually see that Tsutae harbors similar feelings - and despite the entirety of the preceding length, this is instead what becomes the linchpin for the writers and the filmmaker as dialogue zeroes in more on the virtue or vices of women than of men. Maybe I'm giving them too little credit; after all, they do show one side of the coin while speaking to the other, and maybe it was their underhanded intent through that duality to lay out the regrettable behavior of both men and women. Or maybe this really is simply sexist, and those involved were too ignorant to see it.

It doesn't matter, anyway. In the last moments Manabe's bland music endures as we see how nothing has changed after all between Yoshiji and Tsutae, nevermind everything that we've witnessed for the last eighty minutes. Well, I guess that's a wrap. What was it that I was supposed to be taking away from this?

I don't specifically blame 'Suzaki Paradise' for the fact that it took multiple attempts for me to get through it as I passed out for a good few hours in the middle. But in my experience a high quality picture can shake me from my drowsiness, while bad or so-so pictures can make me sleepy even if I'm wide awake. Whatever else is true here, it didn't keep me awake, and when all is said and done, considered as a whole I'm not surprised how my night turned out for me. Coming from the same filmmaker who would a few years later give us the exquisite 'The graceful brute' (or 'The elegant beast'), I admit to some measure of disappointment. Others will watch this and find it to be greatly meaningful; I'm glad for them. I see the potential that it had, but for my part I don't think it goes anywhere or does anything special. Such is life. On to the next feature.

This is only the first film of Yuzo Kawashima that I watch and I'm definitely looking for more of his work! Kawashima remains virtually unknown in the west, which is a shame, since, from what I've read, he was a pioneer of Japanese new-wave, a big influence for Shohei Imamura and was highly regarded in Japan. The film is about a young, homeless couple in search for job, that ends up in a small bar just outside the Suzaki red-light district in Tokyo. I found the film really absorbing, I actually felt that I was living too in a small house at the edge of Suzaki river, watching the trucks, the noodle delivery men, the prostitutes and their clients crossing the bridge, in and out of the district. There are also some nice scenes of the busy and full of life streets of the 50s Tokyo. Overall, this is a fascinating film, on par with the other Japanese classics from the 1950s, that deserves to be distributed in the west along with more Kawashima movies, so that we get a chance to discover this neglected director.

Tatsuya Mihashi and his wife, ex-prostitute Michiyo Aratama are down to their last 60 yen. They go to the gates of Tokyo's red-light district and hesitate. She gets a job as a bar girl, and he as a soba delivery man, but she wants better things, and and so....

There is discussion of recently enacted blue laws, but there are always ways around those, and the world is full of men with extra money and women who want nicer things, no matter how they may get them Miss Aratama's employer has been waiting for four years for her husband to return to her and their two sons; but why should any man walk into that situation when the world is full of willing women? Certainly the verge of Asakusa is no place to seek virtue.

Yûzô Kawashima's film offers a bleak view of the 'new' Japan, filled with the same people who made the old one. Even should these two find redemption, what chance have others?