Mizoguchi is apt to seem the more borderline bathetictoday, Naruse the more realistic

It is a passage as modern, as contrapuntally abstract, as Resnais's Muriel, or the finale of Antonioni's The Passenger.

One needs to take with a grain of salt the contemporary critical tendency to validate a work of art by calling it "dark," "darker" or "darkest." Understandably, defenders of Naruse want to stake out a separate territory for him, but perhaps we do him a disservice by exaggerating his pessimism. In any case, is "pessimism" even the correct word, if all that we mean is a rejection of that sugarcoating of conventional cheerfulness? Freud once said that he was trying to bring his patients from hysterical misery to ordinary unhappiness. Naruse's characters certainly know about ordinary unhappiness, but to the degree that they regularly fight clear of hysterical misery and hold on to a dazed integrity, finding momentary compensations, satisfactions and trade-offs along the way, I find his movies rather comforting-not to mention satisfying, in the way of all such poised, well-executed art.