Three Loves

I will say this for Masaki Kobayashi, there is a lot of ambition in his second feature film as both writer and director (The Thick-Walled Room was filmed first but delayed four years by the Japanese insistence on not revisiting the darker portions of their involvement in the Second World War). He wanted to tell a story of the three types of love (the Greek words agape, philia, and storge aren’t ever explicit, but they’re pretty obviously the three words most likely applying, though there’s a...