Tôkyô no koibito

Setsuku Hara in trousers and a jaunty beret and a zoot-suited young Toshiro Mifune make a handsome and appealing couple in this handsome and appealing bittersweet slice of life which does for Tokyo and the River Sumida in the summer heat what Jacques Becker's 'Rendezvous a Juillet' had recently done for Paris and the Seine (and before that Rene Clair's 'Le Million').

Gracefully directed by a filmmaker new to me, Yasuki Chiba, it vividly evokes post-war Japan, complete with an early onscreen appearance by the yakuza.

Setsuko Hara is a street artist who does a caricature of Toshiro Mifune, a man who makes replicas of jewelry for display. He also succor's Miss Hara's room mate, Yôko Sugi, when she gets caught in the rain. By the middle of this comedy, they have quarreled, Mifune has drunkenly beaten a street gang, a 500,000-yen ring has fallen through a drawbridge, Mifune is pretending to be Miss Sugi's husband, and men are dancing on the bottom of the river.

It's a comedy, of course, which is not the sort of thing you expect to see Mifune is, but he's good in this, smitten with Miss Hara; she, of course, is angry with him, but there's little doubt they will get together by the end. It's a rather dark comedy, with Miss Sugi desperately ill, and everyone having real money worries in underclass Tokyo. Even so, director Yasuki Chiba brings through a pleasant, complex mix of smiles and tears.