Chibusa yo eien nare (Forever a Woman). 1955. Japan. Directed by Kinuyo Tanaka. Screenplay by Sumie Tanaka. With Yumeji Tsukioka, Ryoji Hayama, Junkichi Orimoto. 4K digital restoration by Nikkatsu Corporation, The Japan Foundation; courtesy Janus Films. North American premiere. In Japanese; English subtitles. 110 min.
The celebrated Japanese actress Kinuyo Tanaka was also a brilliant director in her own right, as demonstrated in Film at Lincoln Center’s major upcoming retrospective. Much like Ida Lupino in Hollywood, Tanaka did not shy from playing honest, rebellious, and even, at times, unflattering women in films by Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujirō Ozu, Keisuke Kinoshita, and others, and her own directorial efforts ardently challenged the persistence of women confined to traditional Japanese roles. MoMA presents the North American restoration premiere of Forever a Woman, her astonishingly sober but heartbreaking portrait of the real-life tanka poet Fumiko Nakajō, who became a divorced mother of two small children after leaving her unfaithful, drug-addicted husband, had a brief dalliance with a journalist, and confronted late-stage breast cancer without a trace of sentimentality (Tanaka herself depicts the surgery with unflinching clinical precision), all while charting her solitary path as an author.