Naruse’s women are imperiled by life itself because they are so close to its everyday rhythms and so exposed to the chance encounters of the street. A masterpiece of Naruse’s elliptical and unemphatic fifties style, Anzukko is built largely on the movements of the heroine, Kyoko, through various streets, toward and away from her parents’ house. The daughter of a famous novelist, Kyoko chooses as her husband an aspiring writer of questionable talent, letting herself in for no end of hardship as he succumbs to alcoholism. One of the harshest of Naruse’s female melodramas, Anzukko is also a sharp portrait of male failure. The husband is trapped between a prewar cultural ideal that he is unable to live up to and a postwar modernity that he refuses to embrace; the liberalism with which Kyoko’s father approaches her marriage arrangements brings on calamity. The complicity between father and daughter, which provides the film with its emotional continuity, is that of two people who love each other, know that they have failed each other and effortlessly forgive each other. – Chris Fujiwara