Late Chrysanthemums

Mikio Naruse - 1954
Lilting, beautiful, intelligent, deeply effecting.
The establishing shots need not be at the start of the scene. They are, as we saw in Yamanaka and see in Ozu, often pushed in at the side of the frames deep, with converging lines leading to distant doorways. The camera, again thinking of Ozu here, is in a low position. It generally only moves to reframe. There are also frequent, not narrative driving shots of a road stretching deep away on the right of the frame. That various characters go down this shape (the roads can be different) gives juxtapositions, as do sights of people both coming towards us, and going away.
Naruse isn't really all that much Ozu-ean in his direction (in the pathetic amount of Ozu I have seen), in that his edit is different. He has a wonderfully smooth pace, perhaps helped by the rythmic repetitions of the music, dog barking, or other noises that follow each other through parts of the film.
His compostions raise some fundamental questions? What is a SRS sequence, and what is the line between it and an establishing shot? What I mean is that not full establishing shots, but clear two shots with a bit of the room, favour one person, and the next shot of the conversation is invariably the 'reverse' to the other partner. So if this is SRS, much of it includes both in it. There is also a lot of more traditional SRS, never impatient.
The mis-en-scene is also surprisingly dark (forgetting that this might be the print). The light is generally from above, perhaps in front, and quite harsh, but the fill seems minimal. The film is all the same quite soft, with the shades in a cloish palette. Yet, there seems a bit of depth. How? Well, the characters sink into the background, but there's not a lack of depth... this may be a matter of focussing not entirely on the character's faces.
People are always doing something. Drinking, with their hands. This is Naruse's famous focus on materiality, here principally money. It shapes the characters, what they do. This is really terrific, intense and complex, deep, dense, requiring concentration, social analysis and analysis of life. The dialogue and the image are both dense, complex, with their own thoughts and richochets between them. As I said, it requires great concentration, but it achieves quite something when one is up to it (as I am of course not always; I could get a impatient for the end, I sadly confess).
We have here women aging, it is sad, yet they are not sentimentalised. Trying to live without the worldly miseries of men, the oppression of patriarchal society, has one bitter and twisted (for all the comprehension), or just slowly fading. This is though far too simple an analysis; 'bitter and twisted' is all wrong. More like 'finding a way', that we, and she surely, know is weak. Is there a right way? We understand that the children, for all their forgetful cruelties, do, as is said, know how to live? But what for those whose way of life has greyed? Do they follow this? They must, and they can't. Their is friendship, is that enough? What would enough be? A great work.