Nick Wrigley, Masters of Cinema wrote:
At the close of the war in Japan, a widowed mother makes every possible sacrifice to bring up her ungrateful son and daughter who are unimpressed with their poor standard of living at home. They gradually reject her in search of the material comforts that working as a maid cannot provide. The mother’s despair becomes interminable.Read More »
Quote:
Everyday, 12 April 2006
Author: sharptongue from Sydney, Australia
The style is equivalent to the kitchen sink dramas which came to prominence in the 1950s. No kitchen sinks here, but plenty of the gritty (or, more accurately, muddy) details of everyday life on rice farms and fishing boats, where the only labour-saving device is a cow to pull a rotary hoe – and the cow is only on hire. Much screen time is devoted to planting and harvesting the rice, and catching fish and eels on the lake. Punishing work, liked by no-one.Read More »
Synopsis:
In Song of the Cart-Pullers (Niguruma no uta, 1959) one of his most visually captivating works, Satsuo Yamamoto resurrected, through the struggles of three-generation family in rural Hiroshima Prefacture, an intimate history of Japanese peasant life, from the harsh late Meiji years to the Taisho Rice Riots and the tragedies of the pacific war.Read More »