Through a Glass Darkly is yet another Ingmar Bergman film I have watched repeatedly.  I’m not sure the story is quite as cohesive as Wild Strawberries or Seventh Seal, but it’s still an absolutely fascinating film.  I’m not sure I’ve completely made sense of it, but I made an attempt.  This is the first of Ingmar Bergman’s Silence of God trilogy so maybe it will make more sense after I’ve completed the entire trilogy.

Supposedly, Kieslowski’s Colors trilogy was inspired by Bergman’s Silence of God Trilogy.   Bergman said of the trilogy,  “These three films deal with reduction. Through a Glass Darkly — conquered certainty [certainty achieved, God defined]. Winter Light — penetrated certainty [certainty unmasked, God exposed]. The Silence — God’s silence -the negative imprint [negative impressions]. Therefore, they constitute a trilogy.”

And… “Through a Glass Darkly was a desperate attempt to present a simple philosophy: God is love and love is God. A person surrounded by love is also surrounded by God. That is what I, with the assistance of Vilgot Sjöman, named ‘conquered certainty.’ The terrible thing about the film is that it offers a horrendously revealing portrait of the creator and the condition he was in at the start of the film, both as a man and as an artist. A book would have been much less revealing in this case, since words can be more nebulous than pictures.”

Perhaps Bergman identified with David, the writer, who uses those closest to him as material for his art.  He maintains an objective distance from those he loves and this creates a painful isolation because artists are not easily forgiven by those who have been objectified through their art.  Also, Bergman was the son of a pastor who had been an advisor to the Queen so this trilogy was an attempt to work through his disillusionment with the emotionally cold Lutheran Church.

Only four characters are used which Bergman calls a sort of musical Chamber play.  Karin is the main character.  She has just been released from an asylum.  Karin’s younger brother, Minus.  He desperately wants a relationship with his father.  Karin’s & Minus’s father, David, the emotionally distanced writer.   He is almost completely objective about Karin’s breakdown because he knows he can use it as subject matter for a future book.  Karin’s husband, Martin.  Martin is a physician and clearly loves Karin although he doesn’t really allow her a voice.  He’s somewhat smothering.   The film revolves around Karin’s descent into madness the affect on David, Minus and Martin.

It seems that Karin and Minus have an incestual relationship and it has been suggeted that there may have been a sexual relationship between Karin and her father, too, although I didn’t see that as clearly within that relationship as I did the relationship between Karin and Minus.

The title, Through a Glass Darkly, comes from 1 Corinthians 13:12:  “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”  This is the King James interpretation but new versions usually refer to a mirror rather than glass.   The Swedish Bible of 1917 also referred to a mirror rather than transparent glass.  The mirrors of the ancients were polished metal so images were seen darkly and imperfectly.  Apparently, Bergman’s title is read literally as “mirror” so a distorted reflection is likely what he had in mind.

So what does this mean, exactly?  That  the reflection of God is much darker than the actuality of God?  That our own self-reflection is much darker than the reality of our being?  Maybe both?    Does Karin see God, or a reflection of her own insanity?   Karin waits with great anticipation her meeting with God, but all that comes through the door is a stony faced spider that tries to penetrate her.  She looked into God’s eyes and they were cool and calm.  When she wouldn’t allow God to penetrate her, God crawled up her chest and face and back onto the wall.    So what does that mean??   Some people think the spider represents an incestual relationship between Karin and her father. Could be.  But, Bergman said the spider represented “a question of the total dissolution of all notions of an otherworldly salvation.”

Karin has been waiting for the appearance of God with great anticipation.  What is it she expects to get from this encounter if not some sort of salvation?    Karin represents the play between two worlds: the world of reality and the world of illusion.  From an existential perspective, the religious desire for another world is delusional.  We live in this world and to place the focus of life on some future, more perfect existence, is to negate life.   It’s a sort of insanity.

Karin decides she can’t possibly live in two worlds so chooses the world of insanity over the world of reality.  Nothing can save her from her descent.  There is no hope for her at all.   At the end of the film, she puts on sunglasses, perhaps symboliing the rejection of light?   Karin has made the descent into nihilism -she’s rejected the reality of this world in favor of the illusion.

I have a theory on the spider that may or may not make sense.  I’ll just put it out there.

I’ve written repeatedly about Nietzsche’s warning that we have been a slave to our idea of an abstract God for thousands of years and now that we finally realize it, we should not allow ourselves to become slaves to reason.   Perhaps the stony faced, cool and calm spider represents God as reason?  Karin refuses to be penetrated by reason and so she descends into insanity.   It’s a negative transcendence rather than a mystical, spiritual one.   The mystical transcendence of reason is not about letting go of our reason or rejecting reason or getting rid of it.    It’s simply about keeping it in perspective and not allowing ourselves to be slaves to it.  If we do, we become like David and one day find ourselves attempting to drive our car off a cliff because that’s the rational response to an absurd world.

I’d love to know how Bergman came up with the idea of using a spider as God.  In Jonathon Edwards Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, there is reference to a spider - we are hanging over the fires of Hell by the thin strand of a spider’s web and God can cut the web at any moment.   I always imagined it was a spider that would cut the strand.   But the God Karin sees isn’t angry so I guess that doesn’t really fit.  In Crime and Punishment, Raskonikov says he doesn’t believe in a future life and Svridigailov replies, “And what if there are only spiders there, or something of that sort… We always imagine eternity as something beyond our conception, something vast.  Vast!  But why must it be vast?  Instead of all that, what if it’s one little room, like a bathhouse in the country, black and grimy and spiders in every corner and that’s all eternity is?  I sometimes imagine it like that.” That doesn’t really fit, either.  In Norse mythology, the spider sometimes refers to Loki, a trickster God.   Ananse in African folklore is also a spider-god and a trickster god.  Athena was associated with the spider because she turned the mortal weaver, Arachne into a spider for having the hubris to think herself better than the gods.    But that doesn’t really fit, either.

And what does Bergman mean that Through A Glass Darkly is conquered certainty (or God defined)?   Especially if conquered certainty (God defined) is God is love?  For those of us who have struggled with the existential question, God defined as love is somewhat trite, especially the way it is described by David at the end of the film.  Apparently, Bergman himself was sorry about this epilogue.   When David first offered this definition, I thought it was going to be countered as trite, but this was exactly what Minus wanted to hear.  What was most important was that his father finally talked with him.

So here is another thought about the spider God who is cold, distant, and wants to penetrate people but is unable to do so if he is refused.  God is often referred to as the father and this father figure has become an extremely distant, cold, abstract God.   People suffer horribly and this God does nothing.  We long to know the father, but he’s not there.  So when David finally talks with Minus, especially about God being love and love being God, it’s as though God is made known.  God is defined.   Conquered certainty.

Just one last thought:  the film reminded me of one of my favorite American short stories, The Yellow Wallpaper, which was written in 1892 by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about a woman who descends into psychosis.

I actually watched Seven Samurai last week so am posting out of chronological order.

Seven Samurai is one of Akira Kurosawa’s more famous films.   It’s often listed as one of the greatest films ever made (usually in the top 25 on various lists).  It takes place in Japan during the 1500s.  There is a lot of poverty and people are hungry.  It starts out with bandits who are considering the raid on a farming village, but they change their mind because they had already stolen all of the village rice so decide to wait until fall after they have harvested the barley.  News gets to the farmers and they are panicked and grief stricken because they are already starving thanks to the lack of rice.  They decide to higher samurai to help protect them.

Toshiro Mifune plays a crazy, but lovable wild man who used to be a farmer but is mistaken for an undisciplined Samurai (although he is not mistake as Samurai among the Samurai).  Takashi Shimura plays a very distinguished, confident, wise and disciplined Samurai who organizes the seven Samurai.  I loved watching Shimura in this film.   It amazes me that he can go from playing the meek Kanji Watanabe in Ikiru (which I think is probably my all-time favorite movie), to the rambuncious drunk doctor in Drunken Angel to the sophisticated, confident Kambei Shimada in Seven Samurai.  He’s incredibly versatile.  He’s fantastic!   So is Mifune.  But so far, he isn’t quite as versatile as Shimura - the characters he plays all have a sort of jerky, energetic quality about them.  But Shimura had been acting for quite a while when Kurasawa made these earlier films and Mifune was new to the movie scene.

I think it’s interesting that both Bergman and Kurosawa set many of their films in the middle ages.  I think telling modern stories based upon past history allows the viewer to let go their modern day prejudices and engage in the story in a way they wouldn’t be able to do if it were set in modern times.     The middle ages were extreme times for many societies so provide an excellent setting for existential themes.   Japan experienced very long periods of civil wars and the Samurai reached it’s height of glory during these wars.

The Samurai followed the Bushido code which is somewhat analogous to the western understanding of Chivalry.   During WWII, a new breed of Samurai was born, the Kamikaze, which likewise adhered to the Bushido Code.  Because of this code, the Japanese were able to employ much harsher disciplinary methods than any other WWII force.   They were brutal on their own forces because the code taught that defeat was the deepest humiliation.  Military commanders would inflict unbelievably strict disciplinary action on their troops and would also send their troops straight into artillery fire knowing that it was suicidal.  The code demanded loyalty and so the commanders could get by with this treatment of their soldiers.   The code also allowed for the inhumane treatment of American soldiers because according to the code, they weren’t true soldiers.  They were cowards in search of their own glory.   The code allowed for extreme inequality.  It could not create a decent society.  It could only “reflect and reinforce the inequality and brutality of a violent society”.  (See Seven Samurai by Dr. Patrick Cooney.)

I think Kurosawa wants to allow Japanese society some self-reflection and can best do this through use of the past.  The villagers are deeply afraid of the Samurai because during the civil wars, they would take food from the farmers, rape their daughters and kill those who interefered.    When the seven samurai enter into the village that has asked their help, they don’t understand why everyone hides from them.  They finally start to trust each other, but when the Samurai discover that the villagers have killed Samurai in the past, this greatly angers the Samurai who now want to kill the villagers rather than help them.   Mifune’s clownish character tells them that it is the Samurai’s fault that the villagers have acted that way toward the Samurai.  The brutality of the warring class has created extreme hardship for the villagers and they were forced to do extreme things to survive.  The Samurai feel ashamed after they are made to understand the inequality of class distinction by Mifune’s character.

Kurosawa does not view the Samurai as heroic.  At the end of the film, Shimura’s character says that it is the farmers who have won, not the Samurai.  The film ends with the village joyfully singing as they go about their work.  The warriors and the warring way of life is defeated by life sustaining work. From an existential point of view, the individual is victorious over the abstract principles of the Bushido Code.

Wow!

This film was made just after the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Toshiro Mifune plays an old man who wants to move his family to Brazil to keep them safe from the effects of an H-Bomb.  His family thinks he is insane and doesn’t want to move.   Really, they don’t want to move because they will lose their ineheritance.  So they declare the old man financially incompetent in order to maintain it and the courts reluctantly agree.

Clearly, the man isn’t incompetent, he’s shrewd.  And if you get right down to it, every Japanese citizen has irrational (but possibly completely rational) fears about the destructiveness of the H-bomb.

It’s silly, perhaps, but those were my thoughts when I was very young.  Why would man create such a thing?  I was of the generation that was taught to “duck and cover”.    I  remember seeing a man shot in the head on a news cast when I was very young.  It must have been something very new because my mother was very upset that I witnessed it.   We hadn’t been immune to that sort of media coverage, yet.

I think that may be the point of Kurosawa’s film.  We become immune to what we should experience as completely outrageous.   Nakajima’s family has become complacent about living in fear and thinks their father insane that he hasn’t managed to obtain this same complacency.  The father can’t understand this complacency.

It is an interesting thought that Nakajima’s family can afford the complacency because of what Nakajima, himself, built.   Kurosawa welcomed Democracy.  What he didn’t welcome was the materialism that came along with the capitalism that came to Japan through Western Democracy.   Life itself was made less important than material abundance.

Think about 9/11.  We are far enough away from it to be somewhat rational about it now.  We gave up our freedom in order to secure our materialism.  Bush told us to go out and shop, go to Disney Land.  Distract yourself from the reality of what was really going on.

How much absurdity are we capable of rationalizing rather than seeing it for what it is?

Still making my way through Akira Kurosawa films and had to back up to his censored Post War films because I somehow missed Drunken Angel.  So glad I noticed I had missed it because I loved it! It stars Takashi Shimura and Toshiru Mifune who have been in most of the Kurosawa films I’ve seen so far.  They are both fantastic, especially Shimura.

Drunken Angel is set the Black Market area of Tokyo.  Supposedly, Kurosawa wanted to have all the action take place in a burned down section of the Black Market but the American censors wouldn’t allow it.  I didn’t fully understand why, but apparently one of the conditions was that the Japanese could in no way criticize the American Occupation.

Despite censorship, Kurosawa managed to get away with far more in this film than he been able to in previous films.   According to Lars-Martin Sorenson, they wanted him to get rid of the title because they believed Drunken Angel was blasphemous.  (That cracks me up!!)  They wouldn’t let him use a German song (Mack the Knife) he had intended to use because the Germans had sided with the Japanese against America.  (No filmmaker was allowed to use German songs in their films).   So Kurosawa wrote his own song (Jungle Boogie) which he did not submit in the script and was much worse than the German song in terms because it much more clearly represented the presence of the Occupation.

In 1948, when Drunken Angel was released, the Occupation had been in place for 2 1/2 years.  Living conditions were still extremely poor, so there was a lot of hostility toward the American occupation and Kurosawa shared in this hostility.   Sorenson tells the story about a strike at Toho, where Kurosawa worked.  There had been several strikes and in order to break it up, American soldiers arrived at the studio with tanks and fighter planes.   The event was totally hushed up in the Japanese press. Kurosawa saw this as extremely hypocritical.  On the one hand, Americans preach democracy.  On the other hand, they break up legal strikes with tanks and fighter pilots and heavily censor the press and the film industry.

Kurosawa wasn’t able to place the action in a burned down sector of the Black Market, but he managed to create a set that feels incredibly dirty.  It’s easy to imagine that the kids playing in the water could very well come down with typhoid.

This was Mifune’s first time to work with Kurosawa.  He plays a gangster who has come down with tuberculosis.  Shimura plays a drunk doctor who wants to help him, but the gangster is unable to help himself because he’s trapped by his Western/materialistic lifestyle.

Shimura’s character is a lot of fun to watch.  He seems to be completely unsympathetic toward his patients, but it becomes obvious that he has a deep concern for their well-being.  He calls himself a drunk angel, and in a sense, he truly is an angel even though he is not what most would consider angelic - not even close.

I’ve never actually read The idiot so can’t compare Dostoevsky’s novel to Kurosawa’s adapatation, but have seen this film several times.

Unlike Stray Dog, this movie is cold, cold, cold!!  The origination of the plot for the film is given to us in various ways: some of it is written in third-person narrative; some of it in spoken third-person narrative; and some of it we figure out through the actions of the characters.  I’m not sure I’ve completely followed the purpose of the various forms, but it’s interesting - kind of like reading a novel while simultaneously watching the action unfold in front of you.

The film starts out in written narrative: “Dostoevsky wanted to portray a genuinely good man.  It may seem ironic, choosing a young idiot as his hero, but in this world, goodness and idiocy are often equated.  This story tells of the destruction of a pure soul by a faithless world.”

I’m laying out the plot just to try and get it straight in my mind…

The idiot, Kameda, was accused of war crimes he didn’t commit and was sentenced to death.  At the last minute, the sentence was revoked, and he went crazy from the shock of the pardon.  He developed epileptic dementia and had so many fits he eventually became “an idiot”.  He can’t recall what life was like before his idiocy.

Akama befriends Kameda and tells him about Taeko Nasu, whom he fell in love with because he had been repressed as a child and took one look at Taeko Nasu which immediately released all of those pent up passions.  He stole money from his father to buy her a diamond ring and this so outraged his father he disowned him.  But his father died and so Akama has recently come into his fortune.  Both he and Kameda are headed to Sapporo.  Kameda is going to see Mr. Ono, his only relative, who is tied up in some ugly business regarding Kameda’s ranch, I think.  The military had reported Kameda as officially dead, and it seems that somehow, Mr. Ono sold the ranch through Kayama?  But that has me a bit confused.

Taeko Nasu is apparently a woman of ill-repute.   Supposedly, she’s been Tohata’s mistress since childhood.  Fearing for his reputation, Tohata has offered a dowry of 600,000 to marry her off, but doesn’t really want to let her go.  Taeko Nasu, like Akama, feels like a caged animal.  Akama feels this way because he was forced to repress his emotions, Taeko Nasu because she has been a kept woman since childhood and has likewise has had to repress who she is.

Kayama is about to marry Taeko Nasu in order to get the 600,000 yen dowry and this somehow involves Mr. Ono - maybe because he sold the ranch through Kayama?  I’m not sure.  According to the film, Kayama isn’t really a scoundrel, he’s just an unassertive coward.  Secretly, he’s in love with Ono’s daughter Ayako.

There are lots of twists and turns that keep twisting and turning.

SPOILER WARNING!!

So, Akama ends up with Taeko Nasu, but it isn’t pretty for either one of them.  They look like the Adams Family but with hateful passion rather than joyful, loving passion. The doors creak of their large home creak and everything is dirty and dark.  Really dark.  Kameda ends up in love with Ayako who is likewise in love with him.  But she can’t let go of her jealously toward Taeko Nasu who Kameda also loves, but not in the same way he loves Ayako.  Ayako promises she won’t let her impetuosity get in the way, but of course it does.

Desire, rather than reality, rules the outcome of everyone’s destiny.  Nothing is allowed to be what it is.  Instead, everything is judged on image.  Emotions are repressed and come back to bite in a big way.

Like I said, I haven’t read, The Idiot.  But this sounds a lot like what I know of Dostoevsky’s story.  He was sentenced to death and somehow managed to escape and likewise suffered from epilepsy.   Dostoevsky had some sort of mystical experience during his imprisoned days that made him feel connected to all that is.   He de-magicalized the sacraments and re-framed them within existential terms.   You see a lot of those re-framed sacraments within this film.

The idiot represents Christ and the isolation that is experienced by someone who is “good”.  People recognize the “good”, but they can’t accept it because to accept it requires too deep of a look at their own lives.   Akama’s love is solely based on passion, and this eventually kills Taeko Nasu.  But Kameda’s love for Taeko Nasu is based on the Christian ethic of forgiveness.

This sort of turns the norm around - where the upper class thinks of itself as “good” while the lower classes are “bad”.  This thinking was true in both Japan and Russia (and in the U.S. although the U.S. doesn’t like to acknowledge class differentiation.)

Kurosawa is compassionate toward the suffering of those who get stuck in situations they had little control of but maintains that human beings still control their destiny through the choices they make.  It’s the existential malaise:  we are responsible for who it is we are - no matter our circumstances.  And, what we think of as good and bad has been socially conditioned - it isn’t absolute.   Those who consider themselves to be “good” and superior to those who are “bad” have no right to claim that superiority.  Those deemed “bad” by society remain worthy of compassion and are very often “bad” thanks to the actions of the “good” who refuse to acknowledge their darker sides and what it is they have contributed to the actions they deem unworthy.

Stray Dog is considered to be one of Kurosawa’s first great films.

It’s about a rookie policeman whose gun is stolen and used in several crimes.  The policeman recognizes his existential connection to the criminal early in the film and feels responsible for the crimes that are being committed.  Many more similarities between police man and criminal are presented further into the story.  But, there is one thing that differentiates the men and that is choice.

It is existential choice that defines us as human beings.  No matter how bad the circumstances (and the circumstances are terrible in Post WWII Japan!) we still have the ability to make choices and it is through our choices that our destiny is created.

Excellent film.   Somewhat reminiscent of Crime and Punishment - the heat is excruciating and the mental anguish experienced by Yusa is similar to that of Raskolinikov’s.

I’m still plugging away at Bergman and Kurosawa films.  Not sure how I ended up watching both directors at once, but it’s been fun!  They are roughly from around the same time period and both have heavy existential themes in their films.  I’ve started with the earliest works (at least those available on Netflix) and am watching them in chronological order.  (At least trying to watch them in chronological order.)

I recently watched Bergman’s Seventh Seal - again!  I seriously never get tired of that movie!!  (I wrote about previously).  The next film up is Virgin Spring which takes us into the 1960s.  It’s another great movie that I watched several times before sending it back to Netflix. (And, apparently, Bergman borrowed from Kurosawa’s use of silence for Virgin Spring.)

Virgin Spring is set in 14th Century Sweden.   I think that’s probably roughly the same time Seventh Seal is set because Bergman said he got the idea of a man playing chess with death from a Medieval Church painting from the 1480s.  It’s based on a medieval Swedish Ballad called “Töres dotter i Wänge“.   Virgin Spring is every bit as dark as Seventh Seal and then some!

SPOILER WARNING!!!

Karin is the main character.  She is the “light” child.  She has a half-sister named Ingeri who is the “dark” child and worships the Norse God, Odin.  Karin is somewhat spoiled - definitely catered to by her parents while Ingeri is Karin’s father’s child from a servant so is treated as a servant.  Ingeri suffers the indifference of her father and curses Karin.  The curse becomes a reality that greatly tests the Christian faith of the father when Karin is brutally raped (a scene which is extremely difficult to watch, even by today’s standards), and is killed.  There is an innocent young boy who watches, unable to do anything about what his brothers are doing to Karin.  Furious, the father kills the boy.  He has destroyed innocence just as his innocent daughter was destroyed.

As in the Seventh Seal, God is, of course, indifferent to human suffering and right and wrong.    The father has to relinquish the power he thought he had through his belief in a God that favored the good and punished the bad.  He must accept God’s indifference just as Ingeri has to accept his indifference.  “You saw it, God. You saw it. The innocent child’s death and my revenge. You allowed it. I don’t understand you. Yet now I beg your forgiveness.”

The part that got me was when the herdsman try to sell Karin’s clothing to her mother.  She immediately recognizes them and without any emotion whatsoever says, “I must ask my husband what a fitting price would be for such a valuable garment.”   That gives me goosebumps just thinking about it.  Could you imagine?  What must that mother have been feeling?   You can’t help but sympathize with the brutality of the father, but even the mother tries to save the little boy from that brutality.

It’s a gruesome movie and I’m not 100% sure I understand why the spring flows from the spot where Karin is killed other than that it’s part of the legend.  Ingeri, who is more like an animal than a human being, clearly feels guilt for what she has done because she cleanses herself in the spring.  And I think, like Seventh Seal and Bergman’s other films, there remains a sense of hope and faith in the face of human helplessness and rage.  It’s not just violence for violence sake.

The Quiet Duel kept me on edge! I liked it much better than Scandal. I suppose I’d agree that it is extraordinarily sentimental, but it’s a great story…

A young, virgin (pure) doctor contracts syphilis through a cut finger while operating on an infected patient during the war. He has to deal with the stigma associated with syphilis and the fact that he could pass it on to the woman he loves. He tells her he won’t marry her but never tells her why because he’s afraid that if he tells her, she’ll stay with him anyway but that staying with him will compromise her future.

I’d like to believe there are people around like Kyoji Fujisaki (played by Toshiro Mifune - very attractive in this film even if his character is far more uptight than the character he plays in Scandal.) But it still completely pisses me off when a man withholds the truth because he thinks he’s protecting a woman! Of course, we’re talking 1949 so I suppose we must be at least a little bit forgiving.

Scandal by Akira Kurosawa was quite enjoyable even if a little hokey. I loved Toshirô Mifune’s character as a rebellious motorcycle riding artist and thought Yoskio Yamaguchi was very convincing as the scandalized singer. Takashi Shimura was fantastic in Ikiru but his character in Scandal was extremely irritating. Excellent acting all around, however. Even by the minor characters.

Maybe this isn’t one of Kurosawa’s better works, but I enjoyed it.

I thought One Wonderful Sunday was, well, Wonderful!!

This movie is post WWII. Yuzo has come back from the war and has no money. His fiance Masako likewise makes very little money and has shoes that are extremely warn. But unlike Yuzo who has been changed by the war, Masako has a way of spinning something positive into everything seemingly negative. The holes in her shoes, for instance, allow for easy draining when the roads are wet.

Masako does get very down every now and then, especially when encountering the suffering of youth. But she shakes it off for the sake of a fun Sunday with her fiance.

It is a Wonderful Sunday only by sheer determination. Yuko only has 15 yen and Musako only 20. At one point, they are excited to discover they have just enough money to see a Schubert concert. But just before it is their turn to buy tickets, scalpers buy all of the tickets in their price range and sell them for twice as much.

Their spirits turn downward when they focus upon materialistic gain or lack thereof. But Musako somehow manages to steer the couple toward a more simplistic, far less materialistic focus.

At one point, Musako “breaks the fourth wall” and talks directly to the audience, asking us to clap in support of a young couple who wishes to marry but doesn’t have the money to do so. A bit hokey, but not overly dramatic.

At the beginning of the film, Musako claims that it is far better to imagine possibilities than give into stark reality. By the end of the film, she seems to have a definite point even though the film remains extremely realistic and there is no Hollywood ending making all dreams come true in the end.