Revolving around a provincial, family-run sake business barely hanging on, The Girl in the Rumor spins a dense web of interrelated domestic dramas that hinge on issues of marriage negotiation, filial piety, generational tension and amorality—in short, a distinctly Narusian constellation of themes compacted into a fleet fifty-four minutes. Working from his own dense, elusive script, Naruse constructs the film from a fast-moving series of short scenes, most of them expository one-on-ones between different members of the family. The abundance of spatially compressed medium shots, relative lack of establishing angles, and reliance upon match-cut panning movements render the distinctions between characters and dramatic episodes somewhat hazy, but it’s all in service of a script in which our expectations of characters, and the apparent understandings between them, are strategically upended. In the film’s final act, Naruse’s style gradually integrates such techniques as whip pans and sudden dolly moves, a series of jarring interruptions to match the modern energy of youngest daughter Kimiko (Umezono Ryuko), whose rebellious presence brings the otherwise placid dramatic surface to a roiling tension. – Carson Lund