The Japanese have a slightly less delicate moral minefield to negotiate when making nostalgia movies about civilian life during WWII. There was no Holocaust for everyone to feel complicit in, many people opposed the war, and only a relatively small coterie of lunatics actually thought Japan could take on the U.S., then China, then Russia, and then the entire world. Or at least Kabei would have us believe. A mournful but always restrained film about Japanese life during wartime, Kabei begins at that odd transitional moment in Japanese history where the academics were deeply immersed in reading Nietzsche and Rousseau but still wearing yukata robes and wooden geta sandals. (A few of the younger, nattier ones braved a bow tie or two.) But all the men wore fashionably round spectacles, rode bicycles around town, and tried very hard not to cry when things went badly.

And things in Kabei go badly: The titular mother's husband, a professor, is arrested for "thought crimes" against the state and rots in prison. Her two daughters are confused and frustrated by the way their neighborhood is still innocent (where kids all run off to look at newborn kittens) but hearing militant drums of war marching down the street. One of the imprisoned father's students, Yamazaki, shows up to help take care of Kabei and her girls.

Tadanobu Asano plays the sweet, clumsy student—in Kabei's hush-hush world of good manners and paranoid tension, his performance is refreshingly off-kilter, physically and emotionally. But when he begins to feel less like his professor's stand-in than his permanent replacement, we can watch the dark whirlpool forming in his chest. Even the most honorable men have feelings.

Sayuri Yoshinaga plays the wife, Kayo, as a long-suffering everything. She works for money, raises her daughters, begs the authorities, visits her husband (when they'll let her) with Rushmore-like stoicism. Kabei is a paean to Japan's version of the Greatest Generation, to a woman who did her duty to family and country—though, in her case, her duty to country was to quietly fight against its worst impulses.