Carmen Falls in Love

What starts as a film with sympathies towards the plight of women in post-war Japan spirals into a rather strange concoction of screwball comedy and political commentary, and the result was a little tough to fully appreciate. Early on (and probably at its best), we see an impoverished woman who has been left by her lover trying to abandon her baby, and along with her friend considering taking jobs in stage productions that involve stripping, nude modelling, or outright prostitution. In my favorite scene, we see her friend's supreme discomfort of needing to take off her clothes when the artist's two friends show up ostensibly to appreciate the process, when everyone know they're there to ogle her.

The film spirals a bit with the character of an old and rather ugly woman (complete with facial hair shown in close-up, good grief) representing conservative politics. She is campaigning on behalf of rearming Japan to compete in a world with atomic weapons, and lowering taxes; all that's missing from her spiel is a "Make Japan Great Again" slogan. She happens to be the mother of the woman who is planning on marrying the artist, and it seems all roads lead to the artist, with the model also having fallen in love with him and her friend's baby (apparently) having been fathered by him. This leads to scenes of mistaken identity and various misadventures, none of which were very clever to me.

Buoying the film is Hideko Takamine in the role of Carmen, radiating beauty and vulnerability, and adorable in scenes such as the one where she takes ballet lessons with a bunch of kids. Counter to that was Keisuke's Kinoshita's direction, much as it pains me to say it. I liked the idea of the tilted camera angles as a symbol for the topsy-turvy world of Japan at this point in its history, but not when they overdone to an extreme, as that made the technique lose its power and made me feel like I was on a boat in the ocean when it rocked back and forth. At the end though, it's the weakness of the script that dooms this one to being a subpar film. I'm glad I saw it, but there are certainly many better films from the period.

Very funny movie. I did not enjoy that much the first installment in the Karumen's series but this one just hit the spot for me. The actresses are all wonderful. The men are all good too. Women in this movie really call the shots. The main character is wonderful in some of the scenes. It was wonderful to have a sight to old Tokyo. I guess anyone who is interested in Japanese movies, history or just a movie to spend a funny time would enjoy this. I do not understand why I am forced to write 10 lines, specially after the robot spoiled all my paragraphs so here you go, no need to keep on reading because I am just blabbering to comply with that silly condition.

Carmen suffers through a hard life as a stripper when she falls in love with an artist who is engaged to marry a woman with a large dowry who sleeps around. Carmen's pal has a baby from a man who ditched her that never stops crying. Sudo (the artist) deals with an overbearing mother in law who's running for office and a woman after him to pay her off for her own kid he left her with.

This is basically a soap opera of twists set in early 50's post war Japan. It's sort of wacky, sort of dark, sort of awful. Nobody is likeable really and poor Carmen is treated like dirt. I think it was supposed to be light and funny but it's more depressing. Maybe it was the cultural difference at play but the first Carmen movie was much better, and it wasn't that great either. This ends with a to be continued note, but it never was... oh well.

I loved this movie! My husband did also. It was such an interesting satire of post-war Japan, interesting and hilarious. It was far easier for us to appreciate this urban setting than it was to appreciate the first Carmen movie, which was set in a village, with Carmen and her friend visiting. It's true that the many plot lines were hard to resolve satisfactorily. A third installment of the story was promised at the end of the film, and it is hard to know whether that was truly intended or a convenient way to close, but it is pointed out in the comments that such a film was probably never made. The slightly unsatisfying ending brings me from a rating of "10" to "9," because the wild ending was funny anyway. One of the commenters here, William Flanigan, posting as net_orders, says that the English subtitles were hard to read on the version he saw in 2016. We saw the version TCM presented in 2022, and the subtitles in that version were just fine, though there are a lot of them and I had to pause a couple of times and rewind a little on my TiVo.

It looks like CARMEN COMES HOME was enough of a success that director Keisuke Kinoshita followed it up, with Hideko Takamine and Toshiko Kobayashi repeating their roles as a couple of ditzy strip-teasers who think they're artists. Some time has passed. Miss Kobayashi has had a baby with a communist, who has abandoned her and Carmen is taking care of her. However, when they are trying to abandon to baby in front of a home inhabited by modern artist Masao Wakahara, Miss Takamine is caught. She falls in love with him, even though he's supposed to marry a divorcee in order to split a three-million-yen dowry offered by her mother, who's running for the Diet in the first post-War election on a platform of spiritual values and rearmament. Mr. Wakahara has just paid off the mother of his illegitimate child,who wants more money, and everyone gets confused with everyone else. Miss Takamine can't strip any more, and every time she gets a job, the wives of her employers keep getting her fired.

The movie looks to have been a troubled production. The script is far more serious than the first movie, with some real contemporary issues mixed into the comedy, and real feminist issues were written into the script, probably to better accommodate Miss Takamine's screen persona. DP Hirosho Kusuda seems to have compensated for the lack of color by shooting almost all the shots at an angle, perhaps to suggest to the audience that the whole movie is cockeyed, and after a hundred minutes of screen time, the movie ends with the promise of a third movie to settle matters -- and I can find no sign of one having been made by any of the principals. Certainly they all worked together again, but on different projects.

There are many good parts of this movie, but I am uncertain whether it is particularly good as a whole. Certainly it is a transition piece, both in terms of Japanese society and the star's career arc, and makes reference to those transitions in the script. The start is heartlessly funny, but the later parts are more problematic for me. It was made two-thirds of a century ago for the Japanese market.