Nestled in a humble hilltop home reside Shingo Ogata (So Yamamura), an elderly businessman heading towards retirement and his wife, Yasuko (Teruko Nagaoka). The couple has been married for decades, and have settled into their golden years, living with their son, Shuichi (Ken Uehara) and his young wife, Kikuko (Setsuko Hara), who is growing accustomed to married life by doting on her husband and his parents. Without much warning, Shingo and Yasuko’s other daughter, Fusako (Chieko Nakakita) arrives with her two children in tow. She has abandoned her husband, who she claims was abusive and negligent and has decided to return home indefinitely, recovering from her decaying married while surrounded by her loving family. However, this idyllic version of a traditional family is soon changed when their individual quandaries become known. Shingo is no longer in love with his wife, who knows that she was never meant to be his betrothed, with his heart belonging to her deceased sister. Instead, Shingo has grown extremely close to Kikuko, who he views as the ideal woman for a man like him – humble, quiet and hardworking, willing to go to any lengths to make their home a sanctuary. This contrasts with Shuichi, who has secretly been engaging in an extramarital affair with a mysterious woman, a fact that Kikuko suspects but can’t be sure of, refusing to entertain the idea in the case that it proves to be true. Shingo, sensing the disconnect between his family and himself, decides to repair the fragmented relationships by involving himself in the lives of everyone else. Despite understanding how he is overstepping the mark and interfering in affairs that have nothing to do with him, he feels it his responsibility to no longer remain a passive observer. However, when his own personal issues, such as his romantic feelings to his daughter-in-law and his refusal to accept his other daughter’s decision to leave her husband, he begins to understand how difficult it is to reconcile the complex feelings brought out in situations such as this.

Mikio Naruse was a director that had an exceptionally prolific career stretching over many generations – and while he made films that extended over many different genres and looked at numerous challenging themes, two concepts that he may be best known for are also the most fundamental across all of art: love and the human condition. Much of his work looks at them, either in isolation or through combining them in creative ways, normally taking the form of simple, but unflinchingly unconventional, portraits of existence. One of the works that look at their varying interpretations, particularly in regards to the intersections between them, is Sound of the Mountain (Japanese: 山の音), an achingly-beautiful drama about a family undergoing many separate challenges that converge into their varying relationships with each other. Naruse, who was certainly never one to avoid reducing these kinds of stories to their most basic components, takes a novel by Yasunari Kawabata and composes one of his most understated works, a resilient story of both existential strife and familial unity, which he investigates through a poignant, deeply sentimental portrayal of some of life’s most unexpected challenges, siphoning the story through his own unique vision, turning it into something that could have so easily become nothing more than an overwrought melodrama, but instead functions as one of the most heartwrenchingly powerful stories of the intersections between family and romance, and the different kinds of love that tend to come about in both instances.

In this regard, Naruse seems to be adopting a viewpoint that asks the simple question: what exactly does love entail? At the core of this story is an ordinary family, with everyone involved experiencing different kinds of love. There’s the fundamental love of family, which is shared by everyone equally. There’s the love between parents and their children, which is seen in abundance at the outset – the welcoming of Fusako back home after she abandons her abusive husband, the favouring of Kikuko by Shingo who sees her as his biological daughter, and the constant overlooking of Shuichi’s infidelity, with his parents decidedly refusing to acknowledge that their son is a reckless philanderer. This comes into conflict with the third kind of love, which is that of traditional romantic love. Sound of the Mountain is a love story, but in a very different form, with Naruse weaving together narratives that centre on different characters falling in and out of love, albeit in a way that is far more complex than traditional fictional tropes would suggest – Shingo’s love for Kikuko is the centrepiece of the film – does he see her as his third child and thus treats her as such, or is his favouring of her the result of some underlying romantic attachment, an attraction to the homely, soft-spoken young woman who reminds him of his wife’s long-deceased sister, who he was once madly in love with? Sound of the Mountain is essentially a series of conversations that all tend to follow different paths to get to the same destination, that of love and attachment. Naruse, who made some of the most poignant films on the subject of romance, is once again constructing a powerful statement on the limitless bounds of the heart’s desire, which coalesces into one of the most frankly beautiful statements on love, even if it is just as devastating as the director’s most heartbreaking work.

However, to view this as a film solely about love detracts from the fact that there is an even deeper message here, one that relates to Naruse’s tendency to use the plots of his stories to create vivid tapestries that allow him to ruminate on his own curiosities of the human condition, exploring concepts that often define these films, even when they aren’t particularly overt. Sound of the Mountain is a film essentially about the role of women in post-war Japanese society, which isn’t clear at the outset when it seems as if the central character will be the gentle, unassuming Shingo, rather than the women that are woven throughout the film. As one of the two principal male characters, Shingo is constructed as both an observer and an embodiment of older traditions, with the story being channelled through his perspective, where he acts as a surrogate for both the director and the story’s original author, who were in the throes of middle-age at the time in which this film depicts. This relates to how the women in this film are portrayed – the female characters in Sound of the Mountain are shown to be in contentious marriages, yearning to break free in some way. Kikuko wishes to flee her loveless marriage, while Fusako is shown to have been able to accomplish it – both are on different sides of unhappy relationships, and instead of reviling them for their refusal to conform, the film invests in their journey. The only major female character in the film that seems content is Yasuko, but even she comments on her position as a second-choice to her husband. Whether motivated by fear or mere acceptance, these women struggle to resolve their own disillusionment with married life.

The film imparts the message that these women are constructed as accessories to their husbands, which is a fact they’re actively rebelling against, and which Naruse explores in the dynamic between the innocent Kikuko and the reckless Fusako, who are consistently shown to be on different ends of marital misfortune, by no fault of their own – but which is often provoked as being against traditions by their parents, who see this rebellion, whether vocal or more discreet, as being profane to the natural social order they were raised in. The relationship between Shingo and his children calls into question the challenges that exist between generations, with Shingo’s movement from a mere observer to an active catalyst of the central plot signalling the progression from sacred traditions to a more socially-charged message, which proves to make Sound of the Mountain a strangely resonant piece by modern standards. One of the questions that pervade intergenerational stories is the conflict between holding onto traditions, honouring them in fear of disrupting what is normal, and the inevitable march of time. The out-of-touch protagonist questions his own perspective, not only through being presented with the realization that his ignorance is not an adequate excuse, but also that he himself is a victim to the same subversions of the status quo. The concept of an older, married man being so deeply in love with his daughter-in-law is still a controversial topic, and even when executing it with tact and elegance, Naruse makes sure to relate it to the central story of going against traditions. For all of these characters, the world is changing and their perspectives are being challenged – defining your life by the past is no longer feasible, and sooner or later, one will need to accept that going against sacrosanct customs is far more tempting than one’s principled life would lead them to believe, as evident through Shingo’s emotional journey to understanding the relationship between his family and himself.

Naruse weaves together a fascinating portrait of the human condition, and once again employs a small but exceptional cast of performers to lend their talents to these characters. Like many of the director’s most significant works, Sound of the Mountain is often entirely dependent on the incredible work done by the actors in bringing their roles to life. They enrich the story and give it depth and nuance that simply wouldn’t exist without the intimate relationship the director has when working with his actors in building these characters. Setsuko Hara, who may just be the greatest actress of her generation based solely on her work with Naruse and Yasujirō Ozu, is one of the two leads of the film and grounds the story. Hara’s doe-like eyes often hide a sharp pain when playing the character of Kikuko, a woman who has been forced to accept gentle complacency as her path in life. Her enchanting beauty and sensitive demeanour are used particularly well throughout the film – starting as a supporting character, she gradually works her way to becoming one of the focal figures, whose emotional journey we are most invested in, which is when she reveals an unexpected depth to the character, a kind of lived-in grit that Hara perpetually managed to convey with such ease. So Yamamura is equally as impressive as the family’s patriarch, whose struggle to find a balance between respected traditions and the progression of time, makes him an unconventional protagonist. He is at first simply an observer, and then gradually works his way to becoming an active participant in the lives of his family. Sound of the Mountain is a film built from contradictions, with each one of these characters struggling with the perpetual oscillation between doing what is natural and what is expected. Naruse derives some deeply human performances from everyone in the cast, and whether playing a lovable older woman who functions as comic relief (in the case of Teruko Nagaoka), or a cad who doesn’t get the comeuppance he deserves (such as Ken Uehara), the ensemble of Sound of the Mountain is exceptionally strong and embodies the quiet but resilient sense of melancholy that the film requires from them.

We never quite learn exactly what the sound of the mountain refers to – the best guess is that it is a reference to the distant longing that these characters feel towards the metaphysical forces that put them in the precarious position between tradition and modernity. Each one of these characters long for a distant, evasive sense of understanding, being guided by the solidity of their traditions, embodied by the mountain – strong, ancient and unchanging – but yearning for the evasive, ethereal sounds of the changing winds that are always just out of reach, perpetually in flux. Sound of the Mountain is a remarkably timely film – there aren’t many films produced at the time that look so frankly at issues of divorce and abortion without portraying them as scandalous or scarring, but rather in a matter-of-fact manner, where they’re addressed as important subjects that take up the space in important conversations. The film never creates overwrought melodrama from these challenging topics, and instead focuses on finding the more tender meaning that underpins such discussions, exploring how they contribute to the central discourse that governs this film, namely the disconnect between the past and the present. As we’d expect from a film by Naruse, Sound of the Mountain is propelled by a few fundamental aspects – an exceptionally strong story that looks at serious but important themes without resorting to misplaced austerity, raw and honest emotion that allows for the deep and insightful exploration of these issues, and an exceptional ensemble of performers do very well in interpreting a simple story that relies on their firm command of the most intricate minutiae of the human condition. Naruse offers a deeply poignant glimpse into the trials and tribulations of an ordinary family, each of which struggles with their own personal quandaries – and through his meticulous attention to detail, his incredible insight into issues of existence and his unwavering humanity, he manages to put together one of his most incredibly complex, achingly beautiful portraits that encompass some of the most fundamental aspects of the experience of being alive, something Naruse was far too good at conveying through his work.