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For a long time, Kinuyo Tanaka was a face, a luminous and moving presence, magnified by the greatest Japanese filmmakers, including Mizoguchi, her mentor, whose unforgettable films she illuminated. (Miss Oyu, Intendant Sansho, Life of O’Haru gallant woman…) It was only belatedly that we learned that the immense actress had also gone behind the camera, a fact then almost unprecedented within an exclusively male industry. In fact, the six films she made between 1953 and 1962, small jewels of formal audacity with an astonishing frontality, between neorealism and the Japanese New Wave, all favor the angle of the feminine and the point of view of her heroines, in often hybrid narratives: Love letter (or the painful reunion of former lovers in ruined post-war Japan) thus mixes documentary and melodrama. The moon has risen combines swirling comedy and melancholy on themes dear to Ozu (the marriage of girls, the opposition between town and country, tradition and modernity).
women’s night, on the difficult reintegration of prostitutes, does not skimp on a certain violence. But it is with eternal motherhood that Tanaka delivers her most personal and feminist work. A poignant portrait tackling, with sometimes staggering crudeness, the three main axes of a woman’s life: conquered freedom (through divorce and writing), carnal desire and the confrontation with illness and death. An x-ray of feminine passion, of a rare modernity, to be discovered in sumptuous restored copies.