Aozora musume

Masumura’s sophomore feature marks his first collaboration with iconic star Ayako Wakao – a legendary partnership that would spawn twenty of the pair’s best films. Wakao plays Yûko, a willful 18-year-old high school student who leaves her small village in search of her estranged cleaning lady mother and her businessman father, who never acknowledged her. As Yûko ventures to find her place in her father’s dysfunctional household, A Cheerful Girl swiftly switches gears from a Sirkian melodrama to a blithe deconstruction of the post-war nuclear family, charged with irony, mischievousness, and utter irreverence for the venerated Japanese family drama. Filmed in gorgeously earthy pastel colors, A Cheerful Girl is one of the most atypical coming-of-age Asian pictures of the 1950s. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)