Overview: In their humble two-room apartment, the Maeda family seem ever so self-effacing - but their modest façade hides another truth. Daughter Tomoko is the mistress of a bestselling author with well-lined pockets.

Son Minoru embezzles funds with his lover Yukie (Ayako Wakao, Red Angel), who has her own hidden agenda. And father Tokizo (Yunosuke Ito, Ikiru, Lone Wolf and Cub) is a former military man who swears he will never return to the poverty he knew during the war, no matter what the cost.

One after another, those affected by the Maedas’ schemes show up on their doorstep. But these visitors all have their own duplicitous agendas. With each knock on the door, the gamesmanship reaches a whole new level. Elegant Beast was adapted by Kaneto Shindo (Onibaba, Naked Island) from his own stage play.

Director Yuzo Kawashima, mentor of Shohei Imamura and a major influence on the Japanese New Wave, makes magnificent widescreen use of the single apartment setting to deliver a ferocious satire on Japan’s post-war economic miracle.

Blu-ray Verdict: When watching Japanese films of the thirties, fifties and early sixties (a bit of a hiatus for the war), I find myself constantly asking myself two questions: Why are Japanese films still for the most part so little known, and How was it that the Japanese were able to produce fine films with such consistency over such a long period (when one compares them particularly with the huge volume of junk churned out by the US film industry in order to produce a small corpus of good films?)

Japan was by this time was the largest single country producing film in the world, in itself a remarkable fact for a monolingual film industry relatively un-reliant on exports. The Japanese were overtaken by India sometime in the seventies but that the Indian and European film industries should be, as they currently remain, the largest is completely unsurprising (they each produce something like 1000 films a year).

Both are huge continents with cinema traditions that are multilingual with several different centers of production (the majority of Indian films are made in the various centers in South India not in Bombay) but of the monolingual traditions ((with films being made largely in one center - Hollywood or Tokyo) ,only the US was really comparable but produced many fewer films in total as well as and many fewer of high quality.

This Kawashima film (aka The Graceful Brute) is a beautifully observed and, at times, very funny satire on the moral postwar Japan, an area in which Kawashima was something of a specialist. Certain key scenes - the moment when the family remember their time of poverty or the brother and sister’s wild dance in the sunset, Wakao’s surreal imagined stair-walk as she recounts her plans for the future - are unforgettable.

Wakao’s performance is often rightly praised but it is actually the eerily ordinary performances of Yûnosuke Itô and Hisano Yamaoka as the parents that make this film so remarkable.

I have only seen two other films by him but both are excellent in very different ways. Suzaki Paradaisu: Akashingô (1956) is a more melancholy postwar study of a drifting couple while Bakumatsu taiyôden (1957) is a very funny period drama with comedian Frankie Sakkai which also has a sly contemporary relevance.

However, both are strongly recommended. Kawashima was a major influence on Shohei Imamura (who co-wrote Bakumatsu taiyôden) whose early comedies like Hateshinaki yokubô (1958) and Buta to gunkan (1961) cover rather similar territory (and they are still to be discoverd for those who do not already know of them, trust me).

Special Features
New 4K restoration
Uncompressed mono PCM audio
Interview with film critic Toshiaki Sato
Appreciation by filmmaker Toshiaki Toyoda
Visual essay by critic Tom Mes on post-war architecture in Japanese cinema
Trailer
New and improved English subtitles
Reversible sleeve
Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Midori Suiren and contemporary archival writing

www.radiancefilms.co.uk