Lightning (Mikio Naruse, 1952) (Patreon)

First things first: if you haven't checked out Dan Sallitt's wonderful e-book on Naruse, you really should. I'm finding it incredibly helpful as I work my way through these films. I've been reading his entries after making my own notes, just to avoid unconscious copying of Dan's ideas. But I went ahead and looked at his notes on Lightning, because it is a very strange film.

Floating somewhere in a devil's triangle between melodrama, broad comedy, and a more straightforward family picture, Lightning strikes a curious but fairly consistent tone. The film is about a relatively large family, composed of four siblings and a couple of in-laws. The matriarch of the family (Kumeko Urabe) had each of her four children with four different fathers, and it is unclear whether or not she was married to all of them at the time. She has cultivated a traditional womanly helplessness that has hardened into resentment and constant whining, a selfishness that she passed along to most of her kids.

For the most part, Lightning focuses on the youngest daughter Kiyoko (Naruse regular Hideko Takamine), who works as a bus tour announced on a Tokyo route. Seeing how her mother subjugated herself to others her entire life, Kiyoko is striving for complete independence, and the primary conflict of the film revolves around Kiyoko's struggle for a modern, proto-feminist identity when her family wants nothing more than to marry her off to a moneyed cad (Sakae Ozawa) so they can all sponge off of him.

Naruse depicts Kiyoko's family as a cesspool of narcissism and opportunistic greed. The depiction of the characters around Kiyoko is played straight but verges on lampoon. When Kiyoko's sister Mitsuko's (Mitsuko Miura) husband suddenly dies, the mother, oldest daughter (Chieko Murata), and her husband (Kenzaburo Uemura) all pressure her to cash out his life insurance policy and give them money. Mitskuo soon discovers that her husband had a lover, Ritsu (Chieko Nakakita) who had a baby by him. She quite brazenly requests money from Mitsuko, who reluctantly complies.

Although Mitsuko is the only family member Kiyoko can stand, she also serves as a negative imago for Kiyoko, a sign of what she will become if she doesn't sever ties with her toxic family. Naruse organizes Lightning by having these parasites constantly swarming around Kiyoko, criticizing her for not marrying the man they picked for her, and basically having any ambition whatsoever. Bombardment is the order of the day, formally speaking. The cramped, noisy interiors of her mother's house contrast with Kiyoko's relative freedom on the bus tours, and eventually, the uncluttered expanse of her new solo apartment. 

Everything is played so straight that the unrelenting chaos and emotional suffocation surrounding Kiyoko seem uncanny, as if we were watching something by Sirk or even Sturges. Naruse uses the awkward pacing as a way to demonstrate the complex horror Kiyoko must escape. Her family situation is almost comically pathetic, a parody of familial duty. When Kiyoko meets her new neighbors, Tsuboni (Kyōko Kagawa) and her brother Shuzo (Jun Negami), their quiet demeanor and good manners almost seem alien. 

The final scene of Lightning, when Kiyoko's mom confronts her at her new place, seems out of place at first. One expects her to pull her daughter back into the fold with her tearfully entreaties. But Kiyoko holds firm, and they reach an understanding. From her position of relative autonomy, Kiyoko can set new terms for dealing with her family, rather than shutting them out. Still, Lightning is unusually frank in its embrace of modern femininity, suggesting that maybe it's time to let the old things die.