Naruse’s third output of 1936 sees the auteur on familiar ground, working in the shoshimin (common people) genre for the up-and-coming P.C.L. company. Released in the United States as Dawn in the Boulevard, the film marks Naruse’s third and final collaboration with lead actress Chiba Sachiko, who would marry the director a few months later. In this sixty-minute para-romantic treasure, Chiba plays a country girl on the hunt for respectable office work in Tokyo, finding instead only profligate men and a temporary bar job as a hostess. Through remarkably economic dramaturgy (Naruse wrote the original screenplay) and a touch of feisty, experimental editing, the film carves out ample space not only for autonomous female subjectivity, but also for rambunctious flights of fantasy and fancy. In one of the filmmaker’s most intense and intricate dream sequences, cinematic technique—stylized lighting, unconfined camera movement, and Ito Noboru’s zappy soundtrack—is used to exalted, surreal and ultimately redemptive ends. Everyday reality emerges as both the epicenter of all the world’s misery and as the only terrain we have at our disposal: Naruse at his humanist-nihilist best. – Nace Zavrl