Made during his richest period, Mikio Naruse’s 1954 adaptation of a novel by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata about the bonds between a lonely wife (the great Setsuko Hara), her brazenly philandering husband, and her brooding, sympathetic father-in-law (So Yamamura) was one of the director’s favorites. Characteristically, the poetry of the mise en scene and the economy of the editing are terse and unsentimental, with Naruse’s sense of life’s perpetual disappointments firmly in place. In Japanese with subtitles. 94 min. (JR)