Shohei Imamura's Japan June 2, 2007

rybesh

Intentions of Murder: Born of peasant stock Sadako (Harakawa), the dull-witted and lumpen lynchpin of the piece, leads a thankless day-to-day existence tending the tumbledown shanty dwelling that she inhabits with her unaffectionate common-law husband Koichi (Nishimura) whilst playing mother to his son Masaru, a child from a former marriage whom she cares for as if her own. Her prostitute grandmother and her lowly café waitress mother now dead (the latter having hung herself), Sadako dutifully and uncomplainingly accepts her tenuous position within a society that she is only marginally a part of, as Koichi's shrewish mother regularly reminds her how lucky she is to have been taken in by her son.