Otome gokoro sannin shimai / Three Sisters and Maiden Hearts

 

Mikio Naruse: 乙女ごころ三人姉妹 / Otome gokoro sannin shimai / Three Sisters and Maiden Hearts (JP 1935). Chikako Hosokawa (Oren), Masako Tsutsumi (Osome) and Ryuko Umezono (Chieko).

乙女ごころ三人姉妹 / The Asakusa Sisters [the English title on print] / [Tre sorelle dal cuore di serve].

    JP 1935. Prod.: P.C.L.

    Director: Mikio Naruse. Sog.: by the story Le sorelle di Asakusa / 浅草の姉妹 / Asakusa no shimai (1933) di Yasunari Kawabata. Scen.: Mikio Naruse. F.: Hiroshi Suzuki. M.: Koichi Iwashita. Scgf.: Kazuo Kubo. Mus.: Kyosuke Kami. Int.: Chikako Hosokawa (Oren, the eldest sister), Masako Tsutsumi (Osome, the middle sister), Ryuko Umezono (Chieko, the youngest sister), Chitose Hayashi (the mother), Chisato Matsumoto (Oharu), Masako Sanjo (Oshima), Mariyo Matsumoto (Okinu), Heihachiro Okawa (Aoyama, Chieko's boyfriend), Kaoru Ito (the bad boy), Osamu Takizawa (Kosuki, Oren's boyfriend).

    "Christels Lied" ("Das gibt's nur einmal") (comp. Werner Richard Heymann, lyr. Robert Gilbert) from Der Kongress tanzt (DE 1931).

    "When It's Lamp Lighting Time in the Valley" (words and music by Joe Lyons, Sam C. Hart and The Vagabonds: Herald Goodman, Curt Poulton, Dean Upson, 1933) / "Kodin kynttilät" in Finland.

    Loc: Asakusa, Tokyo.

    75 min

    35 mm print with English subtitles from Japan Foundation

    Courtesy of Toho

    Il Cinema Ritrovato, Bologna 2025: Sorrow and Passion: Pre-War Mikio Naruse.

    Introduced by Alexander Jacoby e Johan Nordström

    Viewed with e-subtitles in Italian at Cinema Jolly, 21 June 2025.

Alexander Jacoby e Johan Nordström (Bologna 2025): "Naruse’s first film after his move to P.C.L., and his first talkie, this stylish melodrama was adapted from Sisters of Asakusa, a story by Yasunari Kawabata, who would win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1968. Naruse recounted the travails of three sisters in the shady Asakusa district of Tokyo through a complex flashback structure. Kawabata apparently credited Naruse’s script with curing what he perceived as the weaknesses of his original treatment, while Naruse, by contrast, regretted having complicated the simplicity of the story."

"Naruse used sound creatively, making atmospheric use of sound effects, employing the then-novel technique of voiceover, and interspersing the dialogue scenes with scenes shot silent and played with only musical accompaniment. Catherine Russell notes that “Naruse’s decoupage in Otome gokoro sannin shimai remains as flamboyant as it was in his silent films. The pacing is very quick, and the scenes are often broken into a fragmented assemblage of close-ups and medium shots.” The film was shot partly on location in Asakusa, and preserves the sights and sounds of pre-war Tokyo. The opening scene contains valuable footage of the famous Senso-ji Temple, the original buildings of which were destroyed by firebombing in March 1945."

"Typical of its studio, the film displays a marked Western influence. Naruse acknowledged taking inspiration from The Power and the Glory (William K. Howard, 1933), which pioneered the use of flashback and voiceover in Hollywood, while one character sings a song from the successful German musical Congress Dances (Der Kongreß tanzt, 1931). About three minutes’ worth of footage was trimmed by the censors for alluding to prostitution, an example of the moralistic interference that was commonplace in Japanese cinema during the 1930s."

"At the time of its release, “Kinema Junpo” published a discussion between four critics, who concluded that Otome gokoro sannin shimai was the best Japanese talkie they had seen to date; it is a mark of the excellence of Japanese film in 1935 that it ultimately did not even rank in the magazine’s Best Ten for that year!" Alexander Jacoby e Johan Nordström (Bologna 2025)

AA: It was a thrill to see Mikio Naruse's Three Sisters and Maiden Hearts, his first sound film and debut film for P.C.L., soon merged into Toho, where Naruse became a house director for the rest of his life. It was Naruse's first collaboration with the Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata from whom he later also filmed Sound of the Mountain.

Naruse immediately orientates us into the spirit of the place, the Asakusa district of Tokyo, with compelling establishing shots. In this heartbreaking environment three sisters eke out a living as samisen players and nightclub dancers under the stern eye of their own mother. The life of a woman as spectacle has been hardly gratifying before. Now a new challenge, recorded music, is threatening even that existence.

Naruse is already the complete film-maker, combining the poetry of silent cinema in long plotless sequences with the new possibilities of sound, including voiceover. Like Ozu, he was happy before WWII to explore a wide range of cinematic means, including whip pans and complex flashbacks, only to orient towards increasing simplicity after the war.

In Naruse's first sound film, music is all-important. Together with the traditional Japanese tunes of the three sisters, cosmopolitan imports from country & western to German musicals and "O sole mio" are thrown into the mix.

Three Sisters and Maiden Hearts is a film of disillusion, tough melancholy, darker than elegy. It faces disappointment, loneliness and sorrow with a long, hard look. Sayonara! The train leaves the station. Lingering in mind are images of circles inside circles, a fade to black and a tough final cut.

What I miss in Naruse is transcendence. In comparison with Ozu and Mizoguchi, his is a cinema of immanence.

The 35 mm print looks like a dupe from a pretty clean source. Black levels are missing. Might the source be a 16 mm print?