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.
The Big Three
Mizoguchi • Kurosawa • Ozu
The Forbidden Love: As a young noblewoman, Oharu falls in love with a low-ranking page, Katsunosuke (Toshiro Mifune). Their affair is discovered; Katsunosuke is executed, and Oharu’s family is banished.
The Concubine: Her father, desperate for money, sells her as a concubine to a Lord who needs an heir. Oharu bears him a son, but is immediately cast out by the Lord's jealous wife once her "job" is done.
The Courtesan: She is forced into the Shimabara pleasure district. Despite her beauty and talent, she is eventually rejected after she insults a wealthy but fraudulent client.
The Wife: She finds a brief moment of happiness with a humble fan-maker. This period of peace ends abruptly when he is murdered by a thief.
The Nun and the Streetwalker: Oharu attempts to find solace in a convent, but is raped by a man from her past; the incident is blamed on her, and she is expelled. She ends her life as a "street-level" prostitute, ignored by the very son she once bore for the aristocracy.
The "One Scene, One Shot"
Mizoguchi is famous for his use of the long take and complex staging.
Distance: He often keeps the camera at a distance, using high angles and tracking shots rather than close-ups. This prevents the film from becoming a "weepy" melodrama and instead creates a sense of "observational fatality."
Choreography: The movement of actors within the frame is meticulously planned. One notable example is the tracking shot of Oharu running through a bamboo grove after Katsunosuke’s execution, where the trees act like prison bars.
Venice Film Festival: The film's success at Venice in 1952 (where it won the International Prize) helped introduce Japanese cinema to the West, alongside the works of Akira Kurosawa.
Kinuyo Tanaka: Her performance is regarded as one of the greatest in cinema history. She portrays Oharu from ages 20 to 50, capturing the physical and emotional toll of her journey with incredible subtlety.
Comparison to the Novel: While the source novel by Saikaku Ihara is a satirical, erotic comedy, Mizoguchi and screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda transformed it into a tragic, serious critique of feudalism.
Ugetsu (1953)
Two brothers, one consumed by greed, the other by envy. In a time when the land is savaged by marauding armies, they risk their families and their lives to pursue their obsessions. Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Ugetsu” (1953) tells their stories in one of the greatest of all films — one which, along with Kurosawa’s “Rashomon,” helped introduce Japanese cinema to Western audiences. The heroes are rough-hewn and consumed by ambition, but the film style is elegant and mysterious, and somehow we know before we are told that this is a ghost story.
The opening shot is one of Mizoguchi’s famous “scroll shots,” so named for the way it pans across the landscape like a Japanese scroll painting. We see a village, the roofs of the rude houses weighed down by tree branches to keep them from blowing away in the wind. We meet Genjuro (Masayuki Mori), a potter, and his brother Tobei (Eitaro Ozawa), a farmer. Although gunshots on the wind suggest an army is near, Genjuro is loading a cart with bowls, cups and vases, packed in straw. His wife Miyagi (Kinuyo Tanaka) begs him not to risk a trip to the city at this time of conflict — to stay home to protect her and their son. But he insists, and Tobei, filled with goofy excitement, insists on coming along, despite the protests of his wife Ohama (Mitsuko Mito).
.jpg)