Women of the Night (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1948)

Kinuyo Tanaka and Sanae Takasugi in Women of the Night

Fusako Owada: Kinuyo Tanaka
Natsuko Kimijima: Sanae Takasugi
Kumiko Owada: Tomie Tsunoda
Kenzo Kuriyama: Mitsuo Nagata

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a novel by Eijiro Hisaita
Cinematography: Kohei Sugiyama
Production design: Hiroshi Mizutani
Film editing: Tatsuko Sakane
Music: Hisato Osawa

Rougher and less polished than Kenji Mizoguchi's prewar films and the masterpieces -- The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954) --  that would follow, Women of the Night is still one of his harshest and most unforgiving works, with several breathtakingly raw moments. It begins in the aftermath of the war, with Fusako struggling to get by: Her husband is still missing and their small child is dangerously ill. A woman to whom she tries to sell some spare items of clothing hints that her best option is to prostitute herself, an idea that she rejects in shock. She then learns that her husband has died, and the opening sequence ends with the sick child going into convulsions. There's a remarkable jump cut at this point, and we see Fusako somewhat better dressed and learn that the child has died, but she has gone to work for her husband's former boss, Kuriyama. By accident she also meets her sister, Natsuko, whom she has not seen since the war, when Natsuko and their parents were in Korea. Natsuko is working as a "dance hostess," and when Fusako introduces her to her teenage sister-in-law, Kumiko, the girl is taken with what sounds like a glamorous job. Fusako and Natsuko move in together, but Fusako has been cultivating a profitable illicit relationship with Kuriyama, and one day she arrives home early to find that Natsuko is also sleeping with him. Furious, Fusako finds the old woman who had suggested that she become a prostitute and takes her revenge on her sister and her boss by becoming a streetwalker. Meanwhile, Kumiko runs away from home and she, too, winds up prostituting herself. Eventually, the three women find one another and struggle to get out of the destructive cycle into which they have been drawn. The story is highlighted by a couple of remarkable scenes: In the first of them, the naive Kumiko encounters a street hustler who belongs to a gang of young thugs; after raping her, he sics the girls in the gang onto Kumiko, who strip her and then make her one of them. Later, Fusako discovers that Kumiko has become a prostitute, but when she tries to get the girl to an organization that tries to rehabilitate prostitutes she is set upon and severely beaten by a gang of streetwalkers who oppose the reformists. Mizoguchi stages these violent scenes with brutal clarity. Unfortunately, Women of the Night ends with a somewhat sentimental scene in the ruins of a church whose stained-glass window of the Madonna and child seem somehow to have escaped breakage. Even Mizoguchi later felt inclined to apologize for the film, particularly for what he felt was its dominant note of anger. But as a story about the predicament of women, it's still a fascinating postwar complement to his more finished 1936 films Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion.

Sisters of the Gion (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1936)

Isuzu Yamada and Fumio Okura in Sisters of the Gion

Omocha: Isuzu Yamada
Umekichi: Yoko Umemura
Shimbei Furusawa: Benkei Shiganoya
Sangoro Kudo: Eitaro Shindo
Kimura: Taizo Fukami
Jurakudo: Fumio Okura
Omasa Kudo: Sakurako Iwama

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Kenji Mizoguchi, Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a novel by Aleksandr Kuprin
Cinematography: Minoru Miki
Film editing: Tatsuko Sakane

"Why do there even have to be such things as geisha?" laments Omocha at the end of Kenji Mizoguchi's Sisters of the Gion. The line could well be a motto for Mizoguchi's career as a filmmaker, as he returned again and again to the theme outlined in the film, not just for geisha but also for prostitutes, mistresses, and wives: Why do women have to spend so much of their lives employing their talents, intelligence, and energy at pleasing men? In this larger sense it's a theme that preoccupied not only Mizoguchi but also Yasujiro Ozu, Mikio Naruse, and other Japanese filmmakers, especially after the war, when political and social change altered the roles of both sexes. Sisters of the Gion is decidedly pre-war, but it's a film that can hold its own with those of the postwar renaissance of Japanese film. It's both of its time and prophetic of what is to come, embodying the dynamic of tradition and change in its two sisters, Omocha and Umekichi, the former outwardly faithful to but inwardly rebellious against her profession, the latter resigned to its demands. In the end, both suffer defeat, but the film implicitly endorses Omocha's defiant strength.

Utamaro and His Five Women (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1946)

Toshiko Iizuka and Minosuke Bando in Utamaro and His Five Women

Utamaro: Minosuke Bando
Okita: Kinuyo Tanaka
Seinosuke: Kotaro Bando
Oran: Hiroko Kawasaki
Takasode: Toshiko Iizuka
Oman: Kyoko Kusajima
Yukie: Eiko Ohara
Shozaburo: Shotaro Nakamura
Oshin: Kiniko Shiratao
Takemara: Minpei Tomamoto

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a novel by Kanji Kunieda
Cinematography: Minoru Miki
Production design: Isamu Motoki

Utamaro and His Five Women is a film about the male gaze, but is it a celebration or a criticism of it? Kenji Mizoguchi is well-known for films like The Life of Oharu (1952) that explore the lives of women with deep sympathy and understanding, so it's easy to read the Utamaro biopic as a criticism, a portrait of the sometimes desperate existence of the women who inhabited "the floating world" of the 18th-century Japanese demimonde that was the subject of much of the artist's work. But the film also teeters over into exploitation even as it's revealing the seamy side of the male-dominated society. There's a satiric edge to the scene in which Utamaro and his assistants clandestinely observe a powerful lord's gathering of young women who strip to their underclothes and run into the water to catch fish. In a long pan down a row of the women, they disrobe in sequence like a chorus line in a musical. Meanwhile, the assistants are obviously taking more than an aesthetic interest in what's happening. Utamaro and His Five Women was Mizoguchi's first film after the war, and was made under the close observation of the occupying forces who were generally opposed to historical films for fear that they would celebrate the values of pre-war militaristic Japan. Fortunately, the film passed muster, probably because Mizoguchi's subject, a famous artist, represented the positive in Japanese culture. Even so, it's a subtle film with a sly double edge. 

A Story From Chikamatsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

Kyoko Kagawa and Kazuo Hasegawa in A Story From Chikamatsu

Mohei: Kazuo Hasegawa
Osan: Kyoko Kagawa
Ishun: Eitaro Shindo
Sukeemon: Eitaro Ozawa
Otama: Yoko Minamida

Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Screenplay: Matsutaro Kawaguchi, Yoshikata Yoda
Based on a play by Chikamatsu Monzaemon
Cinematography: Kazuo Miyagawa
Production design: Hisakaza Tsuji

Kenji Mizoguchi's A Story From Chikamatsu, which has also been released under the built-in-spoiler title The Crucified Lovers, is based on Chikamatsu Monzaemon's 18th-century play The Legend of the Grand Scroll-Maker. It's a romantic drama about doomed lovers that Mizoguchi and screenwriters Matsutaro Kawaguchi and Yoshikata Yoda have expanded into a fable about greed, injustice, and the subjugation of women. The lovers don't even start out as lovers, but circumstances force them together. Mohei is a somewhat overworked apprentice scroll-maker who is thrown together with his master's wife, Osan, almost by accident. The master, Ishun, is a miser and a philanderer, and the circumstances that initially put Mohei and Osan together are almost the stuff of farce: Osan knows that Ishun has been harassing the pretty maid Otama, trying to persuade her to become his mistress, so Osan hides in the young woman's room one night to try to catch her husband in the act. Instead, Mohei goes to Otama's room and is discovered there with Osan. When Ishun finds out he accuses her of adultery, which as we've been shown earlier in the film is a crime punishable by crucifixion. In addition to this crime, Mohei has also been accused of forgery: Ishun had refused to give Osan's brother a loan, so Mohei agreed to help Osan by using Ishun's seal on a receipt, having been assured that the money would be repaid quickly. When confronted with the forgery, Otama intervenes on behalf of Mohei (whom she secretly loves) and says that she asked for the money. The upshot of all this complex of subterfuges, ultimately caused by Ishun's greed and lechery, is that both Osan and Mohei are forced to flee Ishun's household. They determine that suicide would be more honorable than crucifixion, but when they discover that they are in love with each other, they decide that life in hiding would be preferable to death. Things do not go well, of course, but in the end Ishun gets his comeuppance too. There is perhaps a little too much plot and the outcome is foreseeable, but Mizoguchi's mastery of atmosphere, aided by Kazuo Miyagawa's cinematography, lifts the film high above the melodrama. It's at times a strikingly claustrophobic film, whose boxlike interiors sometimes suggest the grids of Mondrian paintings, underscoring the entrapment not only of the lovers but also of those victims of their own avarice, indifference, or subservience who would punish them. When we're not inside, we're on crowded streets, and even when the lovers escape into the countryside, they're adrift on a fog-shrouded lake or framed by the stalks of a bamboo forest, hinting at prison bars. For some reason, perhaps the overcomplexity of the narrative, A Story From Chikamatsu doesn't hold the honored place in the Mizoguchi canon of Ugetsu (1953), The Life of Oharu (1952), or Sansho the Bailiff (1954), but it's still the work of a master filmmaker.

Ugetsu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953)

When does beauty become a flaw? To put it another way, if beauty is only skin deep, how does an artist present it so that we don't linger on the surface of a work and fail to comprehend its depths? I raise this in connection with a viewing of Kenji Mizoguchi's Ugetsu, a film universally praised for its beauty. It's easy to be mesmerized by Mizoguchi's visual compositions and by the sinuous fluidity of Kazuo Miyagawa's cinematography, as well as the poetry of Yoshikata Yoda's screenplay, all at the expense of feeling the coherence of the film's story and characters and ideas with our own lives. I find myself preferring Mizoguchi's less exquisite films to Ugetsu: Sansho the Bailiff (1954), surely, but also The Life of Oharu (1952) and even an earlier film like Osaka Elegy (1936). A case in point: The scene in which Genjuro (Masayuki Mori) returns home after his dalliance with the ghostly Lady Wasaka (Machiko Kyo) is a crucial and mythic one, evoking among other things Odysseus's return to Ithaca. And Mizoguchi stages it memorably: Genjuro enters the near-ruin of his house and finds it empty and littered, the fire pit cold. The camera follows him through the house in a long unbroken take, watches as he goes out the back door and sees him through the windows as he circles the house and re-enters. Only this time when he enters, the room is clean and the fire is burning brightly; his wife, Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka), embraces him. Overwhelmed and exhausted, he lies down and falls into a deep sleep beside his son, only to wake in the morning to find the cold empty room he first entered and to learn that Miyagi is dead. It's a magnificent sequence, a tour de force of acting, directing, camerawork and editing (by Mitsuzo Miyata). It makes a larger, deeper point: that Genjuro will never escape from ghosts. A less gifted director than Mizoguchi would have used conventional techniques like dissolves or double exposures to make the point. But there's also something distracting about instead employing a long, circular tracking shot with an invisible cut: We marvel at the technique at the expense of sharing Genjuro's experience. There is an art that conceals art, and I don't think Mizoguchi attains it here.

The Life of Oharu (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1952)

Kinuyo Tanaka in The Life of Oharu

Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) is by turns a lover, a concubine, a courtesan, a servant, a wife, a prostitute, and a nun, which in the 17th-century Japan of Kenji Mizoguchi's film is almost everything a woman could possibly be. But Tanaka's great performance individualizes Ohara, keeping her from just being a representative figure, a stand-in for Woman. Over the course of the film, Oharu suffers almost every indignity that could be inflicted on her: At the court in Kyoto where she is a lady in waiting, she falls in love with a page, Katsunosuke (Toshiro Mifune), but when their affair is discovered, she and her parents are expelled and he is beheaded. One day a courtier for a powerful feudal lord comes to the village where they are exiled: The lord is in need of an heir, and his wife is barren. Oharu fits his rather exacting specifications to the letter, so she is brought to his palace where she bears him a son, but she's not allowed to nurse the child and is expelled from the household by his jealous wife. She goes to work as a courtesan to pay off the debts incurred by her greedy father (Ichiro Sugai), takes a job as maid to a woman who suspects her of sleeping with her husband, marries a man who is killed by robbers, and becomes a Buddhist nun but is expelled from the temple for supposedly seducing a man who was actually trying to rape her. Years pass and she loses her beauty and now walks the streets to earn money to survive, but she is subjected to scorn and mockery as a "goblin cat" by a man leading a group of young pilgrims. Hope dawns when she is summoned to meet her son, who has succeeded his father as lord, but it turns out that the officials in the court really want to cover up the fact that their lord's mother has been a prostitute, so she runs away after only a brief and distant glimpse of him. At the end she wanders the streets as an itinerant nun receiving alms in exchange for prayers -- her prostitution is now spiritual rather than physical. It's easy to take a synopsis like this and dismiss the story as "lachrymose as a soap opera," and "a reverse Horatio Alger adventure," as a particularly obtuse New York Times review did when The Life of Oharu was first released in the United States in 1964. It is neither of those things, of course. Even the Times reviewer was struck by Tanaka's performance, Mizoguchi's direction, and Yoshimi Hirano's cinematography, without understanding how or why these elevate the story into art. The story comes from a 17th-century novel by Ihara Saikaku, The Life of an Amorous Woman, a work far more erotic and picaresque than the melancholy screenplay Mizoguchi and co-screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda derived from it. The Life of Oharu is unremittingly grim -- it put me in mind of the novels of Thomas Hardy, whose characters suffer more than seems absolutely necessary for the author to make his point about the workings of fate. But the film is not about suffering; it's about strength, and women's strength in particular.  

The 47 Ronin (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1941)

Chojuro Karawasaki in The 47 Ronin

As stately a samurai film as you're ever likely to see, with no action except the initial attack on Lord Kira by Lord Asano and later moment of brief swordplay, The 47 Ronin has a staginess to it that betrays its origin in a play by Seika Mayama. But that staginess is Shakespearean in essence: It's a tragedy, like Hamlet, about the consequence of delaying an action. And like the character Hamlet, the central character of the film, Oishi (Chojuro Kawarasaki), is a man tormented by delay. It's director Kenji Mizoguchi's mastery of pace and tension -- i.e., the pace is slow, but the tension is high -- that kept me riveted to the screen. Admittedly, others may not find it so riveting, and perhaps it's my fascination with unconventional moviemaking (assuming that the conventions have been established by Hollywood) that kept me going. But the opening scene, which consists of a long, slow pan around the courtyard of a Japanese castle, drew me in by a sort of immersive process. We see groups of men kneeling in expectation of something, and then finally a quarrel breaks out: Lord Kira (Kazutoyo Mimasui) berates a man in words that insult Lord Asano (Yoshizaburo Arashi). Suddenly, Asano rises from his kneeling position, draws his sword, and attacks Kira, causing a commotion. Unless you're familiar with the historical story known as the Ako incident in Japanese history, you probably won't have a clue initially to what's going on. But gradually the incident unfolds itself. Asano is ordered to commit seppuku, whereas Kira, who provoked him and survived, goes free. Moreover, Asano's lands are confiscated and his samurai are now masterless -- i.e., ronin. It falls to the ranking member of the Asano household, Kuranosuke Oishi, to lead the ronin in taking revenge on Kira not only for provoking the attack but also to protest the unequal justice that has been dispensed. But Oishi has a dilemma: If a petition for reinstatement of the Asano household is successful, it would rob them of their justification for killing Kira, so any attack on him would have to be well-timed. Eventually, the attack succeeds, but at a high price: the 47 ronin who break into Kira's castle and kill him are honor-bound to follow an edict that they must now all commit seppuku. And so it ends, but not without an interpolated romantic incident that seems to come out of the Hollywood playbook, with however another Shakespearean twist. A young woman (Mieko Takamine) comes, disguised as a man, to where the condemned ronin are awaiting their end. She explains that one of the ronin, Isogai (Kuntaro Kawarazaki), had worked his way into the Kira household as a spy and that they had fallen in love and were about to be married just before the assassination of Kira took place. She wants to know whether Isogai truly loved her or was just using her to work his way into the household. He did love her, of course, and just before he is about to die, she commits seppuku herself. It's a tribute to the tone maintained throughout the film by Mizoguchi's direction of the screenplay by Kenichiro Hara and Yoshikata Yoda that this touch of melodrama feels integral, more Shakespearean than Hollywood.