Home | Movies By Year | Movies from 1955


The Eternal Breasts

Buy The Eternal Breasts now from Amazon

First, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the movie. And once you've experienced the movie, tell everyone what you thought about it.

Wikipedia article




, also titled 'Forever a Woman', is a 1955 Japanese drama film and the third film directed by actress Kinuyo Tanaka. It is based on the life of tanka poetess Fumiko Nakaj (19221954).

Plot



Unhappily married Fumiko, mother of two children, divorces her drug-addicted husband after an incident which she regards as an act of unfaithfulness, and moves back to her mother. At the same time, she tries to find her voice as a poetess, regularly attending a poetry circle, encouraged by her married tutor Hori, whom she loves with a respectful distance. While struggling with the divorce and the fact that she could only take her daughter with her, she is diagnosed with late stage breast cancer. She undergoes a double mastectomy, which she writes about in a series of widely noticed and prize-winning poems, and tries to live her life as freely as possible and as her illness allows. She has a short affair with journalist tsuki, who writes about her in a newspaper series, before she finally dies.

Cast



* Yumeji Tsukioka as Fumiko Shimoj,

* Ryji Hayama as Akira tsuki

* Junkichi Orimoto as Shigeru Anzai

* Hiroko Kawasaki as Tatsuko

* Shir saka as Yoshio

* Ikuko Kimuro as Seiko

* Masayuki Mori as Takashi Hori

* Yko Sugi as Kinuko, Hori's wife

* Chko Iida as Hide

* Bokuzen Hidari as Hide's husband

* Tru Abe as Yamagami

* Fumie Kitahara as Kobayashi

* Kinuyo Tanaka as neighbour's wife

* Yoshiko Tsubouchi as Shirakawa

Legacy



Unanimously highly regarded for its directorial skills, film scholars differ in their evaluation of the themes addressed in 'The Eternal Breasts'. While Alejandra Armendriz-Hernndez calls it "a daring depiction of female sexuality [] as well as a powerful instance of womens creativity and self-expression", Alexander Jacoby sees the "feminist and progressive" theme of a woman willingly choosing career over marriage obscured by the film's concentration on her illness, thus shying away from the more controversial implications.

References




Buy The Eternal Breasts now from Amazon

<-- Return to movies from 1955



This work is released under CC-BY-SA. Some or all of this content attributed to http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1110560043.