Film Review
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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Next Kenji Mizoguchi film:
Ugetsu monogatari (1953)
Film Synopsis
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.