![imoto little sister imoto little sister](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/5e0d1a_713d7ea26424423c8c3702c68c672343f000.jpg)
She’s actually more affected emotionally by the situation than at first appears. Inokichi’s brutishness and insults drive Mon away, with her promising both never to return and to keep her child.
![imoto little sister imoto little sister](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/34/29/ff/3429ff7fe74848164c485a4e9b2de3ce.jpg)
His rough insensitivity is even expressed in the way he drinks water from the courtyard well, which Naruse deliberately contrasts with an earlier scene of Mon doing the same, and then soon follows it up with a shot of a courtyard bush trembling from the impact of the half-eaten piece of fruit Inokichi throws into it. Mori, of course, is great as Floating Clouds’ Tomioka, the self-centred, increasingly seedy, and unworthy object of Yukiko’s love, but here his performance seems too calculated and played on the surface, nowhere as convincing as the other perfectly-cast roles of the film.
![imoto little sister imoto little sister](https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/XCEAAOSwsQJet8Ol/s-l640.jpg)
![imoto little sister imoto little sister](http://img1.ak.crunchyroll.com/i/spire1/73ebb8e463a1c76da929037bd223d9eb1381336718_full.jpg)
Inokichi’s violence and consequently his role are important to the narrative, but it has to be said that Masayuki Mori’s performance is the least satisfactory aspect of Older Brother, Younger Sister. Japanese has no plurals, and no doubt the original Japanese Imoto is meant to refer to both sisters, San and Mon, who, although Inokichi provides the most dramatic scenes in the film, are really at the core of the story. The title Older Brother, Younger Sister is not entirely accurate. In any case, by this early scene we have already learnt of Inokichi’s unreliability and disinclination to keep a job when we observe his father slapping him in the street in outrage at his bad habits (frequenting prostitutes, playing pachinko). We might guess here that his anger and disgust are moral, fuelled by a sense of social shame, but later scenes will reveal that there’s a lot more to it than that. The one family missing here is the older brother of the title, Inokichi, a rough and shiftless young man who is hanging about the streets of their small rural town because of his refusal to meet his “fallen” sister. And elder sister Mon has left home early to support the rest of the family, and now has returned, pregnant and unmarried. Younger sister San is a student nurse, and it’s her return home that structures the film’s three-part narrative. His wife Riki, for her part, supports a family fallen on hard times by tending a small snack shop slightly out of town. First, there’s father Akaza, despondently wandering the riverbank (when he isn’t getting drunk in a bar) since the loss of both his earthmoving business and his own sense of self-esteem.
#Imoto little sister series#
Here’s a little-known work that turns out to be simply superb, an almost perfect illustration of Kurosawa’s famous formulation of the director’s style as “a flow of shots that looks calm and ordinary at first glance, reveals itself to be like a deep river with a quiet surface disguising a fast-raging current underneath.” Appropriately enough, the first shot of the film (under the credits) is of river water flowing over stones, and then the following opening sequence sketches with a whole series of visual links (stones, water) the connections - they turn out to be family ones - between a number of characters. Older Brother, Younger Sister is also further confirmation-if you should need it by now-of how great a director Naruse is. Instead, the river, which Naruse constantly returns to as a linking device between sequences, forms a barrier beyond which we never go, just like the majority of the traditionally-minded inhabitants of this rural community. Indeed, the point is made about how close Tokyo is, yet we never get a glimpse of the city, even though San and Mon, the daughters of the family at the centre of the story, both live there. Naruse is in essence an urban director and Older Brother, Younger Sister is one of his rare films with an exclusively rural setting.