CLASSIC FILMS

KEITH UHLICH

Cleo from 5 to 7

Wife! Be Like a Rose! (1935, Mikio Naruse, Japan)

The work of the Japanese director Mikio Naruse tends toward a kind of sublime pessimism. Life isn’t just disappointing (per Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story), but difficult, and worth struggling through because survival is preferable to oblivion. It’s a perversely elating negative point of view, and there’s no better place to begin with the prolific Naruse’s art than his classic 1935 drama (the first Japanese talkie to secure a U.S. commercial release) about a bubbly young woman, Kimiko (Sachiko Chiba), who attempts to reunite her estranged parents, Etsuko (Tomoko Ito) and Shunsaku (Sadao Maruyama). Things do not go as planned, and the failed reconciliation casts light on the tensions in the relationship between mother and daughter. As often in Naruse, the real problem is closer than expected, and its resolution down-to-earth complicated as opposed to fairy-tale ideal. (Streaming on rarefilmm) Cleo from 5 to 7 (1962, Agnès Varda, France)

The film that put French writer-director Agnès Varda on the map chronicles two hours (though the running time is a half-hour shorter) in the life of a French pop singer, Cleo (Corrine Marchand), who is awaiting the results of a cancer test. It begins with a tarot card reading, which lends the proceedings an overwhelmingly mystical quality—suggesting that Cleo’s life, and her eventual death, are very much out of her hands. But the journey is really about Cleo countermanding such nebulous fears by attuning to each individual moment in time. This is a movie about womanhood, cinema (Varda’s compadres Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina pop up in a film within the film) and politics (the effects of the Algerian War feature prominently in the story). Yet like any classic work of art, it also offers us, through its specificity of plot and purpose, a design for living. (Streaming on HBOMax) Charulata (1964, Satyajit Ray, India)

Most of the chatter around India’s Satyajit Ray focuses on the three coming-of-age films— Pather Panchali, Aparajito, and The World of Apu—that comprise the writer-director’s superb “Apu Trilogy.” His 1964 marital drama, Charulata, is a classic in its own right. Based on a novella by Rabindranath Tagore, the story, which takes place during the late-19th century Bengali Renaissance, concerns a Calcutta housewife, Charulata (Madhabi Mukherjee), trapped in a dull marriage to Bhupati (Sailen Mukherjee), an upperclass intellectual. When Bhupati’s cousin, Amal (Soumitra Chatterjee), comes to visit, he tries to help Charulata become more cultured. A friendship blossoms between the pair that nears intimacy but is never consummated. Yet the subli> 20