Movie Review: The Most Beautiful

Historically fascinating, but I can't recommend it as a piece of fiction

This is Part 2 in my project to Review Every Kurosawa Film.

Young women are sent from their homes all over Japan to work under exhausting conditions in a factory that produces optical lenses for military equipment. The factory has increased the production quota expected of all its workers, leading to exhaustion, illness, stress, and in-fighting among a group of women who work together in the factory, and live together in the company dormitories.

What makes this so bizarre is that it is a war propaganda film made during World War II, as Japan was in conflict against the US and Great Britain. The opening text card reads “Attack and Destroy the Enemy,” which would be jarring as an opening to any movie, but especially in a movie like this, completely devoid of violence itself. The plot revolves almost exclusively around these young women learning to set their own interests aside in favor of doing their part to support the war effort. The characters are not so much characters as vehicles for motivational lessons, pushing an agenda that now seems backwards in most cases, and downright monstrous in others.

One of the girls, Watanabe, receives a letter from her father telling her that her mother has taken seriously ill, but encouraging her to stay at the factory and fulfill her duty rather than travel home to help. She almost disobeys, and is busy researching a train home when she encounters another young woman tampering with her thermometer so that her fever won’t be discovered, and she won’t be forced to stay home and rest. Faced with someone so devoted, Watanabe abandons her plan to return home. Another girl is seriously injured, but luckily her hands are fine, so not to worry, as soon as she’s able to get around on crutches, she’ll return to the factory. Overseeing the girls are a few factory supervisors and a dormitory headmistress, all of whom are portrayed as kind and supportive, but with the hindsight of historical context, it’s hard not to view them as ominous, and even manipulative. The headmistress in particular is portrayed entirely as a kindly mother figure to the girls, but my own bias to the material kept me feeling irrationally suspicious of her throughout.

There’s not much of a story here to follow; the girls’ production output rises and falls over the course of the film, as they overcome their differences and find the strength to persevere for the good of the country. It’s hard to get invested in their success when that success feels so wrong, but that counterintuitive moralizing is also what makes the movie occasionally fascinating as a look at a very different mindset.

I’ve mentioned that, so far, I always find at least one shot that sticks with me in Kurosawa’s movies. There are two here. We’re told early on that the girls were encouraged to bring soil from their hometown to put into the garden outside their dorms, and one of the girls being scolded is told to stand in the soil of her hometown and think about how she’s letting them down. Late in the movie, Okabe has been in a fight with one of her coworkers, and we see her exiting the dormitory through the window under the full moon, and think she might be running away. Instead, the camera follows her to the garden, where she stops and begins to cry, standing in the soil of her hometown to find the strength to stick it out. It’s a gorgeous shot, despite how conflicting it is--I’d much rather the character was actually running away from this awful situation.

The second example is when one girl who had been sent home near the start of the movie finally returns. She has been desperate to get back to work, and the other girls have been excited for her arrival, but when she arrives, the other girls–dealing with another, more urgent issue–spill out of the room in a human tide (something that Kurosawa makes great use of in later movies), leaving the returning girl standing confused and alone in the center of the empty room.

I suppose if I had to grade this one, it would be a D-, but it feels disingenuous to treat it as an ordinary movie, when it has so little interest in telling its own story, and the characters themselves rarely even feel like individuals, let alone dynamic figures. I really can’t recommend it as a piece of fiction, even if it is sometimes fascinating as a piece of historical insight, both into the time period, and into the director’s developing skillset.