Somewhere Under the Broad Sky

Keiji Sada and Yoshiko Kuga and a young married couple. They live over the family store in Tokyo with his old-fashioned, kvetching stepmother, Kumeko Urabe, his sister, Hideko Takamine, and his younger brother, Akira Ishihama. Everyone has issues. Miss Kuga feels picked on for her infomal, small-town ways, Miss Takamine is depressed because she has a limp from an injury during a bombing raid and feels useless, Miss Urabe doesn't understand young people, and Ishihama feels a bit guilty about everything; his friends have to work hard, they're frequently homeless, and everyone picks on everyone else. Things are improving in Japan, but there's still a lot of poverty around.

Sada is the glue who holds everything together. He's hard-working, kind and loving. It's a family comedy, but it's a far more complicated, more fragile family than the sort that Yasujiro Ozu was portraying in his series of movies, and the happiness and survival of the family depends not on recapitulating the relationships and rites, but on figuring out what makes the individual happy, and the family caring enough to support those choices...and even nudging them towards making those choices. It's a fine, complicated mess of a story, with a troupe of top actors, and as they evolve from crabby unhappiness to serene joy, it often seems far more real, telling and instructive than a story.