The Life of Oharu (1952) - film review

In 17th Century Japan, a fifty-year-old prostitute named Oharu looks back on her life in sorrow.  When she was a young woman, she brought disgrace on herself and her family by falling in love with a man from an inferior caste.  After being sent into exile with her parents,  she is bought as the concubine to Lord Matsudaira in the hope that she will bear him an heir.  Once she has fulfilled this duty, she is sent back home, only to learn that her father has racked up huge debts on the expectation that she will become a lady of the court.   Oharu’s father has no option but to sell her into prostitution in another town.  Here, Oharu’s attempts to find love and happiness are constantly thwarted by the cruel workings of man and fate.  It is her destiny to be bought and sold, over again, like a used piece of furniture...

The film that brought director Kenji Mizoguchi to the attention of the West (and won him his first award at the Venice Film Festival) is also the one in which he delivers his most powerful critique of feudal Japan.  By the time he made The Life of Oharu, Mizoguchi was one of Japan’s most experienced and highly regarded filmmakers, with a career stretching way back to the early 1920s.  International recognition came only towards the end of his life, coinciding with a remarkable late flourishing of artistic brilliance, of which this is a prime example.

The central theme of The Life of Oharu, the exploitation and ill-treatment of women, is one that recurs time and again in Mizoguchi’s work.  Oharu’s relentless degradation may appear fantastic to a modern audience but this was typical for a woman of her era, even a woman from a relatively privileged stratum of society.   Even as late as the early 20th Century, Japanese women had very few rights and were regarded pretty much as commodities.  Mizoguchi’s interest in the suffering of women in his films owes much to the fact that his own mother and sister were sold as geishas, something that would haunt him all his life.

The Life of Oharu is a profoundly moving film, whose intense emotional impact derives mainly from Mizoguchi’s meticulous shot composition and his masterful use of the long take.  Whereas other directors use montage and close-ups to trigger an immediate emotional response from the audience, Mizoguchi employs a far more subtle technique, which involves creating a distance between his subject and the spectator.  When you watch a Mizoguchi film, you often feel like powerless onlooker to an unfolding tragedy.   The desire to get closer to the subject is a natural human reaction, which Mizoguchi frustrates with his use of static long-shots, making our emotional involvement that much more acute.  Kinuyo Tanaka’s beguiling performance as Oharu certainly plays its part in winning our sympathy, but it is ultimately Mizoguchi’s inspired mise-en-scène that makes Oharu’s story so real and so unbearably poignant.

© James Travers 2010

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