Apart From You

            Mitsuko Yoshikawa and Sumiko Mizukubo                

Mikio Naruse's Apart from You is the best of the silent melodramas he directed in the early 1930s. The plot of this 1933 flick concerns aging geisha Kikue (Mitsuko Yoshikawa) and her disapproving teenage son Yoshio (Akio Isono). The sullen Yoshio is skipping school and slipping into juvenile delinquency. The possibility of redemption is embodied in Terugiku (Sumiko Yoshikawa), a younger colleague of Kikue who has known, and pined for, Yoshio since childhood. Terugiku tries to steer Yoshio to the straight and narrow, but is hampered by a toxic home life. Does Yoshio return to school? Does Terugiku succumb to the lecherous advances of an older man or does true love prevail in the end? I'll never tell, but Apart from You's ambivalent ending moved me.

The film is superior to other Naruse film of this period partly because there is no child on hand to be run over in the next to last reels, as in Flunky, Work Hard! and No Blood Relation. Apart from such melodramatic contrivances, Apart from You benefits from some directorial restraint. Naruse was fond of dollying in and out from his players to add punctuation. In some of his features from this period, he employs this technique so much that I felt seasick, but Naruse employs it only once in Apart from You. That said, Naruse shares with his colleague Ozu a dazzling grasp of technique at this point in film history. He also shares with Ozu a way with his players. The two lead females of Apart from You are particularly sublime. Like all master directors, the details of Naruse's work fall more into place the more you see of his work. Apart from You shares many of the same players and themes in his other films of this period. As Neil Young said, in reply to a heckler who said all his songs sounded the same, "It's all one song."