Otome-gokoro - Sannin-shimai

A soured mothers and two elder sisters deal with a harsh world to try to rear the youngest daughter without their worries. Alas, they cannot succeed.

Mikio Naruse's movie has some issues; he is still trying to deal with movie-making in a fashion that has not caught up with the possibilities of sound. As a result, there is a lot of narration within the movies, explication that would have been handled by a benshi in silent days. Nonetheless, as the mother sours as the elder sisters chafe at the demands on them -- including streetwalking -- the younger sister finds a man who is kind, but cannot protect her from the world, due to his declining health.

What Naruse accomplishes in this movie is to tell of a sisterly love without words, despite a family that does not work in any conventional sense. The three youngsters express their love through their actions, in their absences, in their urging the youngest to get away. Although it bears little relationship, either in character or themes, it shares some relationship with Naruse's INAZUMA, except in that movie, character and selfish relationships force the protagonist into the realization that what is best for her is to run away; here, everyone does that, because they care about her.

The story was remade by Kon Ichikawa in 1983 as THE MAKIOKA SISTERS.