Room For Let (Kashima Ari) – Review

I love it when I discover a quality film I’ve never heard of before, made by a director I’ve also never heard of. In this case, the film is Room For Let (1959) and the director is Yuzo Kawashima.

This film is so obscure it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page! It’s so obscure that I can only find a handful of stills from the film on the internet.

I’ve got to admit that Japanese cinema is one of my blind spots. There’s Kurosawa, and then there’s….Kurosawa. Of course there’s also Mizoguchi and Ozu and Miike but you could count the films of there’s that I have seen on the fingers of one hand, or at most two hands.

So all I had to go on was the write-up in the programme. Which certainly intrigued me. When the write-up includes the word “masterpiece” then my interest is definitely piqued. (I think that may be the first time I have  ever written the word “piqued”.)

I took my seat in anticipation of what wonders I was to behold. I noticed it was filmed in Tohoscope (the Japanese equivalent of Cinemascope). And this was entirely justified because every scene is crammed with activity. This was a farce, a satire, and all the characters were usually up to something underhand or deceitful. What impressed was the everyone on the screen was actually DOING SOMETHING. It may be a quirky character trait, a funny line, a hand gesture, a smile, and it all intermeshed wonderfully. And was also funny. The physicality of the characters was also impressive. There is no doubt that in the original language this film must indeed be a masterpiece of farce, and the fact that it was still quite funny with subtitles was itself an achievement. I’m sure a lot of the dialogue must not have been translated  because it is a wordy film in which overlapping dialogue is rampant.

And then there’s the editing – simply superb. Nearly every scene would both start and end with something quirky and memorable, and so fast that one had to be alert to it in order to catch them. The transitions between scenes were a masterclass in itself. And the timing was razor-sharp in the way characters interacted with each other.

If this film was made today, in English, with English comedy actors, the writer would be hailed as “the new Alan Ayckbourn”.

Kawashima suffered from motor neurone disease and died aged 45. Maybe this is why the film has such a sense of urgency. He made over 50 films though so I think it’s time I checked some more out.