Mother

One of Mikio Naruse's portraits of Japanese women, MOTHER is based on a story written by an adolescent girl for a contest that had mothers as its topic. In the years following WW II, a husband (Massao Mishima) and wife (Kinuyo Tanaka) labor long and hard to reopen their laundry business while trying to raise their four children. When their eldest son dies of fever, and exhaustion claims the life of the husband, the wife is left to rebuild the laundry with her three surviving children. A look at the determination of the working class, MOTHER is an unspectacularly photographed, almost naive, film told through the eyes of the family's eldest daughter. Its art lies in ...