Twenty-Four Eyes (no 22)

 

by Allan Fish

(Japan 1954 155m) DVD1/2

Aka. Nijushi no Hitomi

Goodbye, Miss Pebble

p  Ryotaro Kuwata  d/w  Keisuke Kinoshita  novel  Sakae Tsuboi  ph  Hiroyuki Kusuda  m  Chuji Kinoshita  art  Kimihiko Nakamura

Hideko Takamine (Hisako Oishi), Hideki Goko (Isokichi), Yukio Watanabe (Takeichi), Makoto Miyagawa (Kichiji), Takero Terashita (Tadashi), Kunio Sato (Nita), Hiroki Ishii (Masuno), Yasuko Koike (Misako), Setsuko Kusano (Matsue), Kaoko Kase (Sanae), Yumiko Tanabe (Kotsuru), Ikuko Kambara (Fujiko), Hiroko Uehara (Kotoe), Chishu Ryu (teacher),

Though Japanese cinema has its share of acknowledged masters, all of whom are adequately represented in this selection, there are other names worthy of consideration, two of which – Sadao Yamanaka and Mikio Naruse – are covered elsewhere with masterpieces equally unknown for years.  To them we must add the name of Keisuke Kinoshita.  His series of woman’s pictures and sentimental dramas may not, at first glance, seem worthy to rub shoulders with the great works of the first canonical trio named, but the best of them are great indeed.  His best work is a contentious choice, as equally as many would go for the prize-winning The Ballad of Narayama or even more so Carmen Comes Home, but that work is very hard to see in anything remotely approaching a decent print, and though I have included his masterful A Japanese Tragedy, there’s the fact that Eyes is such a great time capsule for the Japan of the time.  David Thomson may be right to accuse Kinoshita of political naivety, but then again, so was Capra.

            A female teacher in her early twenties comes to a remote island in 1927 to teach a group of twelve young children.  She grows to love them greatly and they her.  But when she falls victim to a good-natured prank of the children that leaves her with a limp and unable to ride the bike she needs to cycle to work, things take a downward turn, which reaches its lowest ebb when not only several of  her old pupils but also her husband is killed during the war.  Finally she ends up returning to teaching, indeed she returns to teaching the children of some of her original class. 

            It would be easy to compare Kinoshita’s work to Goodbye, Mr Chips, but it’s an infinitely richer film.  Both may feature teachers idolised by their children sensing the futility of them growing up to go to war, but that’s where the similarities end.  Kinoshita’s film has underlying messages, and messages still fresh in the minds of an audience less than a decade removed from the final defeat.  Some critics have complained about its length, while others perhaps expected something more feminist on the lines of Naruse or more intimate, like Ozu.  This is an unashamedly emotional film that requires not just a skilled director but also a great actress to make its audience buy into the story.  Kinoshita skilfully underpins the sentimental centre with a precise indictment of how traditional Japanese values were sacrificed at the altar of Hirohito’s colonial ambition, while Takamine is at least as good as she’s ever been, full of the inspiration of youth and the inherent goodness of her character in the opening scenes, while gradually moved to despair by the fates that have been granted to both her and the children she loved.  Those twelve children – the twenty-four eyes of the title – are the justification or otherwise of her life.  Her limp has gradually sucked the optimism out of her, and as we see her in her classroom towards the end it’s not in modern city dress, but solemn black traditional garbs.  She sees her first class in the faces of their children and it moves her almost to tears – tears that return in the simple but transcendental moment when she is taken by the surviving seven original class members to reminisce and finds a new bike waiting for her that they have paid for.  Her face is worth a thousand eulogies and one of the great close-up shots in world cinema in one of its most unheralded masterworks.  Get the Masters of Cinema DVD, grab a box of choccies and a pack of Kleenex and prepare to be truly affected.

Advertisement