Name: Inazuma
Genre: Drama
Released: 1952-10-09
Duration: 1 h 27 min
Rating: 7.5
Cast: Hideko Takamine, Mitsuko Miura, Kyōko Kagawa

One of those competent Mikio Naruse films. Many of them bleed together, but they're easy enough to track down and watch. Sometimes, they surprise me, and sometimes, they're Lightning. This is more than serviceable as a family drama that's surprisingly complicated for something that isn't long, and something that doesn't start too crazy. It branches out and finds quite a few ways to have conflict, though, plenty of it small in nature, yet it all adds up.

It's just about life being hard in small ways. It makes sense in that way. It's comforting and saddening to watch an old movie and realize how some of the suffering is shared/spread across three-quarters of a century, or more. There are certain societal attitudes explored in these older Japanese films that aren't really encouraged anymore, but beyond that stuff, there's still so much about loneliness, marriage, money, work, selling yourself. Balancing it all. Failing to balance it all. Having people who need help, but where's the line when it comes to what you sacrifice? What is too much? Is there a value that is too much?

The film is very broad, and it covers all these things without making them coalesce. I don't think it was necessarily trying to suggest a randomness to life, I think it more might have been thrown together a bit on a writing and directing front. But there are things worth digging into here. I almost get it, and I almost get Mikio Naruse, that ever-elusive filmmaker I keep going back to every couple of months, but not quite; not fully.

Japanese cinema is celebrated for its refined minimalist dramas and avant-garde experimentation; it also introduced popular genres like jidaigeki (samurai epics), kaiju, and anime. Across both high art and mass entertainment, it often explores morality, impermanence, and the pressures of modern life.

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The drama genre is a broad category that features stories portraying human experiences, emotions, conflicts, and relationships in a realistic and emotionally impactful way. Dramas delve into the complexities of human life, often exploring themes of love, loss, morality, societal issues, personal growth, with the aim to evoke an emotional response from the audience by presenting relatable and thought-provoking stories.

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Mitsuko Miura, Hideko Takamine, and Kenzaburo Uemura in Lightning (1952)

Mitsuko Miura and Hideko Takamine in Lightning (1952)

Lightning

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