Hanran / 氾濫 ('Deluge', 1959)

Obscure Japanese Film #27

Ayako Wakao, Shin Saburi and Sadako Sawamura

There’s not much of a role for Ayako Wakao in her third film for director Yasuzo Masumura. She appears (rather than ‘stars’) as Takako, the carefree daughter of Sahei Sanada (Shin Saburi), an employee who invents a new type of adhesive, as a result of which he is promoted to a highly-paid and important position. This newfound success leads to the reappearance of his former mistress, Sachiko (Sachiko Hidari), who has a young son she claims is his, while a student, Tanemura (Keizo Kawasaki), attempts to ingratiate himself with Sanada in order to pitch his own ideas to the company. Sanada resumes his affair with Sachiko, Tanemura begins one with Takako in order to strengthen his position, and Sanada’s wife, Fumiko (Sadako Sawamura), makes a fool of herself in a liaison with her daughter’s opportunistic piano teacher (Eiji Funakoshi). 

Shin Saburi and Sachiko Hidari

Based on a novel by Sei Ito (as was Temptation, featured in my previous post), Hanran is a misanthropic work in which the majority of the characters are portrayed as vain, selfish and two-faced. They engage in a series of shabby betrayals, with everyone cheating on everyone else, while the balance of power between them continually shifts.

Keizo Kawasaki and Ayako Wakao

The one character who triumphs at the end is Tanemura – the slimiest and most reprehensible of a pretty unpleasant bunch. He dumps Takako and marries the boss’s daughter. However, his bride seems considerably less enthusiastic about the marriage than he, and Masumura implies that Tanemura’s victory will be short-lived; the newlyweds climb to the top of a gas storage tank, where the film ends in a heavily symbolic shot – Tanemura might be top of the world à la James Cagney in White Heat, but we all know what happened to him.

Hanran is surprisingly dull for a Masumura film, and fans of Ayako Wakao and Sachiko Hidari will be disappointed that neither have a great deal of screen time, while Shin Saburi is perhaps too low-key in the leading role. The colour photography looks a little cheap, which is not uncommon for a Japanese film of this period – Akira Kurosawa reportedly held out against the use of colour until Dodes’ka-den (1970) due to concerns about the quality of colour processes in Japan. Matters are not helped by Tetsuo Tsukahara’s jazz guitar score, which is intrusive and a little irritating in its incessant noodling.

A scene in which Tanemura takes Takako to a private room in a restaurant then slaps her into sexual submission is all too familiar in Japanese films, I’m sorry to say, and I wonder how many women have been knocked about in real life as a result of such misogynistic scenes. 

Watched without subtitles.