The Cinematheque

“A central work in this disassembly [of the traditional Japanese family] … Ozu was trying to show how a couple can be violent, something you never saw in movies in those days.”

Kurosawa Kiyoshi (Cure)

Ozu’s first film produced outside of Shochiku is this rarely screened gem of a shoshimin-eiga (middle-class drama) about two sisters on opposite sides of the generational divide. Setsuko (Tanaka Kinuyo), the elder sibling, is a traditional, kimono-clad wife to an abusive husband. Her sister Mariko (Naruse muse Takamine Hideko) is a free-spirited, western-attired twentysomething, hip to the latest trends and hostile to the idea of marriage. When Setsuko’s old flame reappears, Mariko makes a play at reuniting the former sweethearts. The sisters’ ailing father (Ryu Chishu), meanwhile, resigns himself to his approaching fate. Made at Shintoho and adapted from a serialized novel (both firsts for Ozu), The Munekata Sisters has been uncharacteristically overlooked in the West, a casualty, critic Hasumi Shiguéhiko would suggest, of its Ozu ​“impurities”—dolly shots, surges of violence, a more melodramatic register. This 2023 restoration serves to counteract that reductive assessment.

In Japanese with English subtitles

“Though more linear and elaborately mounted than any other Ozu film, The Munekata Sisters is typically rigorous and exquisitely composed.”

Harvard Film Archive