A life of epic suffering
Here is the saddest film I have ever seen about the life of a woman. It begins on a chill dawn when the heroine wanders, her face behind a fan, until encountering some of her fellow prostitutes. “It’s hard for a 50-year-old women to pass as 20,” she observes. She says it has been a slow night: She was only picked up by an old man, who took her into a candlelit room filled with young men. “Look at this painted face!” he told them. “Do you still want to buy a woman?” To be held up as a moral spectacle is a cruel fate for a woman who has been treated immorally almost every day of her life, and who has always behaved as morally as it was within her power to do.
The women find a friend who has built a fire, and huddle around it. “I heard you served at the palace,” another prostitute says. “What has led to your ruin?” Saying “do not ask about my past,” she walks away from them and wanders into a Buddhist temple. One of the images of the Buddha dissolves into the face of a young man, and then a flashback begins that will tell Oharu’s life from near the beginning.
As Oharu’s flashback begins, we learn she was born in respectable circles, and was a lady in waiting at the court when she and a young page (Toshiro Mifune) fell in love. This was forbidden, the page was condemned to death, and Oharu and his family were exiled. Her father never forgives her for this, and indeed after the scandal she becomes unmarriagable in respectable circles. There is a brief respite when he is able to sell her as a concubine into the household of Lord Matsudaira. Her duty there is to bear him an heir, which she does, but then is coldly sent back into poverty and prostitution. Her father, who now considers her entirely in terms of her wage-earning ability, sells her as a courtesan, at which she balks, and finally sells her into service as a maid to a lady who uses elaborate wigs to conceal from her husband that she is half-bald. She loses this job because one of her employer’s customers recognizes her from the shimabara (red-light district) and makes crude jokes which reveal her background.
Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956) is today named as one of the three greatest Japanese directors, along with Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. Kurosawa, considered the most “western” by the Japanese, was the first to gain world wide fame, with such readily accessible films as “Rashomon,” “The Seven Samurai” and “Yojimbo.” Ozu was considered “too Japanese,” until the critic Donald Richie famously took a group of his films to the Venice Film Festival, and found, as he expected, that they had a universal appeal. (My feeling is that the more specific a film is, the more widely it may be understood).
Mizoguchi won Western praise earlier than Ozu. His “Ugetsu Monogatari” (1953) won the Venice Film Festival, and twice appeared on Sight & Sound magazine’s ten-yearly poll of the greatest films of all time, which pointed me to him in the early 1970s. But it was “Life of Oharu” that he considered his best film, perhaps because it drew from roots in his own life.
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