The Cinematheque

“[A] magnificent 1960 melodrama. An elegant essay in black and white [TohoScope] and tinkling cocktail jazz, this tale of a bar hostess’s attempt to escape her lot could give heartbreak lessons to Fassbinder and Sirk.”

J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Described as ​“the last classic of Japanese cinema’s pre-New Wave golden age” (Chuck Stephens, Village Voice), Naruse’s When a Woman Ascends the Stairs returns to the melancholic working-class milieu of his earlier Flowing: the fading glory of the traditional geisha world in the modern age. Reminiscent of Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame, the film is set in Tokyo’s neon-lit bar district of Ginza, where widowed bar hostess Keiko (Takamine Hideko) is at a crossroads. Entering her thirties, and aware that she can’t depend on her charms for much longer, she knows that she must either remarry or open her own establishment if she is to avoid a shameful descent into sex work. Few films have captured the exploitation of women with such heartbreaking clarity or quietude.

In Japanese with English subtitles

“The supreme triumph of ​’scope filmmaking.”

Chris Fujiwara, Film Comment

“A melodrama of extreme emotional violence … but Naruse treats it with such evenness that it becomes microscopically subtle.”

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader