Mikio Naruse – Inazuma aka Lightning (1952)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0044745/
TPB : http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4326261/Mikio_Naruse_-_Inazuma_aka_Lightning_(1952)
English subs
Mikio Naruse’s second adaptation of a novel by Fumiko Hayashi stars Hideko Takamine, the director’s frequent muse, as bus conductress Kiyoko Komori, the youngest daughter in a family of squabbling half-siblings. All the children are products of different fathers, though they share the same mother: a tragically weak-willed woman named Osei (Kumeko Urabe). The familial tension only increases when the husband of one daughter dies and leaves behind a substantial insurance policy, so Kiyoko abandons them to their quarrels and makes a go of it on her own, though she finds she can’t leave her mother behind so easily. Takamine is especially terrific, her perpetually wide-eyed, comically exasperated performance at once suggesting Kiyoko’s trappings of the body and the wanderings of her mind. It’s a highly conceptualized piece of work that anticipates the actress’s divisive, tic-heavy take on Hayashi herself in Naruse’s fatally flawed biopic A Wanderer’s Notebook, though I’d certainly place Takamine’s stylings here alongside her masterful turns in When a Woman Ascends the Stairs and Yearning. Lightning never quite reaches the heights of those films (much like Older Brother, Younger Sister, it is superbly modulated, second-tier Naruse), though the climactic mother/daughter confrontationâ��scored to classical music and punctuated by expertly timed lightning flashesâ��is close to perfection and once again illustrates Naruse’s talent for concluding his films on an ideal, though rarely contented final note.
—-my rip—
Comments by the DVD uploader:
the subs here were transcribed from a vhs print that looked as if it had been ran over by a truck, then submersed in a vat of acid for a year. it took a lot of time, but i think i got pretty much all of it. this is one of naruse’s best. enjoy.
