Although at first blush far removed thematically from his Samurai
trilogy, Yoji Yamada’s “Kabei: Our Mother” has many of the same
elements. This is a tale of how the wife of a Japanese professor
imprisoned in 1940 for “thought crimes” struggles to raise her two young
daughters under the most difficult of circumstances. It is a searing
attack on the authoritarianism and stupidity of a Japanese social system
that retained many of the feudal traits of the period depicted in the
trilogy. It is also an embrace of the decency and the courage of humble
people being crushed underfoot by a system operating through a
combination of repression and social pressure. At the age of 78 and now
having made his 74th movie, Yoji Yamada demonstrates once again his
kinship with such members of the great humanist tradition in filmdom
shaped by radical politics—including his countryman Akira Kurosawa,
Senegal’s Ousmane Sembene and India’s Satyijat Ray.
Sharing the meager circumstances of the underemployed Samurai of the
trilogy, Teruyo Nogami (Miku Sato) is a one-time philosophy professor
fallen on hard times. He is 3 months behind on his rent and has just
learned in the opening scene that his latest book has been turned down
by a publisher. Unlike most of his countrymen swept up by the
ultranationalist fervor of the ruling party, he opposes the invasion of
China and has the courage of his convictions to say so publicly. He has
the misfortune to take philosophy’s teachings seriously, a flaw not
shared by fellow academics who learn to get along with the system, just
as they were doing in Nazi Germany.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2009/05/21/kabei-our-mother/
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