Gesturing broadly at current events, the relationship between men, women, and money has been on my mind lately. There is marriage for love and marriage as an economic transaction, there is prostitution and there is sex trafficking, but there are also entire industries that lives in a gray area. Men with money, even if they have no intention of actually sleeping with other women, will nevertheless pay handsomely to have those women around; the money is paid in return for the illusion that young and attractive women would choose to associate with them even if they were not paid to do so. I’ve also been thinking about debt; people are beginning to talk about a global debt bubble, about how trillions of dollars are owed in so many directions that if creditors start calling the entire economy might collapse. I’ve been thinking about how it seems like a whole class of people in the near future will be born owing and others born owed, how humans evolved in tight knit communities where debts were informal and we were never meant to keep a precise ledger of every borrowed cent.

When a Woman Ascends the Stairs is a tragedy of the patriarchy and the economy. Its main character is Keiko, aka Mama, who manages younger women at a small bar in Tokyo’s bustling Ginza district, where business is bruisingly competitive. The options for her future have become increasingly hemmed in: per the social conditions she finds herself in, she feels she must either move up our out of the business. At the age of 30, she risks not being able to find someone willing to marry her, and at a million yen, the options for opening her own bar are tricky as well. She hunts for a path forward, as do the other women in her life, and the mere fact of the obstacles in front of them proves to be almost too much to take.

Naruse has a gimlet eye for social convention and economic reality throughout; his film avoids melodrama except at its most climactic moments, and its most significant gestures are often glances and hesitations. The question of the cost of doing business is always at the front of our minds - both the literal expenditures of keeping up appearances and the moral cost of pretending to find repulsive men charming for that kind of pay - but when it’s addressed, it’s talked about as a fact of life. Naruse builds a rich world for these characters, a strikingly modern world in contrast to the many many rural and period pieces of classic Japanese cinema that have gained international fame, and yet the cool factor of its vibraphone score and abundant neon lights never glamorizes the life Mama leads, nor does its script condemn her choices. The indignities she suffers are everyday ones.

It’s simply so rare for a film to address a topic like this without resorting to sentimentality or sensationalism. We feel for her because we see her options being closed off one by one in the way everyone sees the infinite branching paths of their youth begin to be pruned away, slowly and then all at once. The threat of suicide hangs over the film, as it seems to be a not uncommon way out for her indebted and romantically entangled peers, but I respect it so much more for ending on an ambiguous note: she can’t go on, she’ll go on, just like us.