User Reviews

Shozo, A Cat And Two Women / A Cat, Shozo, And Two Women (Lit.) (Neko to Shôzô to Futari no Onna). Viewed on Streaming. Scenario = eight (8) stars; subtitles/translations = six (6) stars; restoration = five (5) stars. Director Shirô Toyoda's highly imaginative and flat-out hilarious film version (based more/less on a novel with the same name) of a love triangle involving Inter-species and Intra-species jealousies! Points on the triangle: a former (rather reserved/dull) wife; a new (live-wire, self-proclaimed "party girl") wife; and a pliable (more or less) female pussy cat. Add to the mix an overly dominate/protective mother, and her twice-married, ambition-less, and hapless son whose idea of a really good time is being left alone to pet/tickle his feline companion. Wife number one was dumped (by her mother-in-law) because she seemed unable to produce grand children. Younger wife number two has a considerable dowry including the eventual ownership of the small, provincial family shop/residence run by her overly solicitous mother-in-law. Acting is good all round (including the Neko) with well-known actress Kyôko Kagawa delivering a knock-out, high-energy performance (as spoiled/unpredictable wife number two). Waa! Cinematography (narrow screen, black/white/gray) is okay. Restoration needs more attention to brighten images by removing the pervasive gray haze and eliminating opening-credits frame jitters. Sound is fine (especially the "meows"). Orchestral score is sparse but usually enhances a scene when it turns up. Subtitles are a necessity (unless you understand Kansai-Ben (Western Japan) dialect. They are easy to read (even with white backgrounds), but occasionally can be overly long resulting in flash rates that are too fast or overlaps into the next scene. Singing is subtitled. Most/all signs are translated with labels inserted to identify village houses and shops. Classic screw-ball comedy Japanese style! Highly recommended (even if you are not a "cat person"). WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.

Shiro Toyoda's Shozo, a Cat and Two Women often feels rather trifling and (at two and a quarter hours) protracted, but ultimately achieves a bleakly stubborn persuasiveness. As the film starts, Shozo's wife Shinaka is more or less hounded into leaving him by his dominating mother, who wants him remarried to his younger mistress Fukuko, mainly because of the accompanying financial benefits (Fukuko's father also holds the mortgage on their house). Shozo's erotic attraction to Fukuko (especially, it seems, to her legs) is made clear enough - the film is quite ribald at times (and striking in its portrayal of Fukuko's proud sexual self-determination, for which we're told she's even made the newspapers in the past) - but his only real emotional affinity is for his aging cat Lily, disliked by Fukuko, and only of interest to Shinaka as part of her plot to get Shozo back (her options otherwise looking grim). All of this entails a fair amount of repetitive histrionics, but one driven by real anxieties about basic survival - Shozo's immaturity and general inability to engage with reality (left to his own devices, it's clear that the little store from which he makes a meagre living would hardly function at all) seem like a defense against a hard-edged post-war landscape he otherwise finds impossible to engage with. Lily being a cat, it's a recurring mystery over whether Shozo's elevated view of her is at all reciprocated, not least at the end, when he basically leaves the two women (by then seemingly headed for a domestic version of mutually assured destruction) behind and bets everything on her, leading to a strikingly desolate ending. The film's philosophical strands are clunkily underlined by Shinaka's brother-in-law, supposedly obsessed by philosophy, which as manifested here basically just consists of dropping words like "existential" into everyday sentences (to his wife's understandable bemusement).

Hapless underachiever Shozu (Hisaya Morishige), who lives with his grasping, domineering mother (Chieko Naniwa), finds himself caught between Shinako (Isuzu Yamada) the dour and resentful, 'traditional' ex-wife who wants him back and Fukuko (Kyoko Kagawa), the perky and flirtatious 'modern' fiancée, who wants to keep him, and his cat Lily, who is his true soulmate. Although labeled as a comedy, the humour is understated (and some may have eluded my 'western' perspective) but the story is engaging (despite the fact that none of the main characters (except the cat) are particularly likable) and the cast is excellent (note: I watched an English subtitled version), especially the two women who 'hast no rage' when they feel that they are losing the battle for Shozu's affection to a cat. Like many Japanese films from the era, conflicts between traditional (ie classical Japanese) and modern (ie contemporaneous Western) values are central to the plot. Recommended to watch and and to read some of the commentary about the film available on-line. Spoiler: Despite the fact that Lily becomes a pawn in an increasingly bitter rivalry and is occasionally 'manhandled', she makes it to the closing credits unharmed.