While Akira Kurosawa is perhaps the most famous Japanese director (you’ve likely seen his rollicking and accessible samurai thrillers like Seven Samurai and the twisted play on fiction Rashomon), and Yasujiro Ozu is perhaps the most celebrated by critics and film scholars (every serious student of cinema should watch both Floating Weeds and Tokyo Story), the most soulful and literary is handily Kenji Mizoguchi, just as much a master, and responsible for some of the most moving and important – and tragic – Japanese films ever made. The Criterion Collection has recently released one of his best and most harrowing films, The Life of Oharu, and it is nothing short of a masterpiece.
I hate to constantly repeat myself in my reviews of films released by The Criterion Collection, but they are still managing to brush up and turn out some of the best films the world has seen. The Life of Oharu stands out, however, in that it is not an obscurity that has been unearthed (like, say, the often-overlooked Czech epic Marketa Lazarová), but a vital work by an important master, presented in perhaps the best-looking home video release it will ever receive. The picture may not be perfect – the film is from 1952, and naturally shows sign of print wear – but this is not an example of The Criterion Collection cleaning an old classic. It’s an example of seeing one of the most heart-rending and unbearably tragic feature films you will perhaps ever witness.
Kenji Mizoguchi has always been a strongly feminist director – maybe the most feminist director to have covered the subject – often focusing on the plight of fallen and trapped women, forced to marry or into prostitution by an uncaring patriarchal society that is less insidious than it is casually and brutally dismissive of women (indeed, Criterion’s own Eclipse subset released a box set called “Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women”). Indeed, his early films like 1936’s Osaka Elegy and Sisters of Gion from the same year were nothing if not powerful modern feminist polemics that were less about women rising above and taking agency of their own lives, and more about the horrible and pitiable fall of women into undesirable lives. These are not fallen women dramas made to resemble the fallen criminal American counterparts; i.e. they were not intended to be lurid melodramas inviting us to sometimes revel in the vice and filth our heroines found themselves entrenched in. These films were very matter-of-fact analyses of the horrors and tragedies suffered by women.
In 1952, Mizoguchi made The Life of Oharu, and it was a major turning point for the director. Tapping into his previous feminist interests, The Life of Oharu is so epic in scope, it invites comparison to some of the great works of literature of the Western canon; Oharu, the film’s central tragic figure played by the most excellent Kinuyo Tanaka, can certainly be compared to the likes of Dorothea from Middlemarch, perhaps some of Madame Bovary, and even possesses some shades of Anna Karenina. Her story evokes nothing but sadness and pity, and yet Oharu still manages to come across as a profoundly moral person. Oharu, however, does not suffer with nobility, and there is nothing poetic about her suffering; she is not beatific or Christ-like. Her life is merely a string of horrors, dictated less by wickedness, and more by a life of the worst possible circumstances. Mizoguchi’s comment is clearly that women have suffered indignities at the hands of a male-run society for hundreds of generations, and that a fallen woman is a real human being, not a sexual toy or a calculating harlot. There are no villains in Oharu’s life. Oharu is merely forced into a life of street-walking by her circumstances. And she suffers with as much moral rectitude as she can muster.
Oharu begins her life as the daughter of a retired samurai, and is roughly romanced by a passing nobleman of some kind (Toshiro Mifune in a small role). This sexual misconduct naturally brings shame to the house, and marriage to a decent rich man becomes unthinkable. Oharu becomes a royal courtesan, and bears an heir to her owner, but is ousted once her job is done. Her father, seeing her as nothing but a means of income, insists she take a job in a brothel. Eventually she marries, loses her husband within a day, becomes the envied barber in a jealous household who kicks her out because of her shady past, is thrown out of a convent for her shady past, and, as the years pass, falls to begging and street-walking. This may sound like a typical melodrama, but there is something dignified not only about the staid and restrained filmmaking, but about Oharu herself. She is not a bold rebel, a sexual liberator, or a weepy heroine. She is a quiet tragic martyr for the generations of women that followed her. She lives a life of woe.
Of course “woe” isn’t exactly in fashion these days, and tragic tales of a woman’s eventual fall (that are missing the traditional Western lurid exploitation feeling) might seem impossible to many young modern audiences. But Mizoguchi has tapped into something so heartrending (not to mention perfectly constructed), and yet so natural, that you can’t help but weep for this woman. Mizoguchi frames his heroine to be small, the camera lingering over her head, making her appear shriveled and insignificant. The Life of Oharu manages to evoke the one emotion that many filmmakers don’t ever try for anymore: Sorrow. Genuine pitiful sorrow.
The Life of Oharu was an enormous hit for Mizoguchi, and marked the beginning of a golden period in his filmmaking career, which spanned his other best films Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954). Mizoguchi would make five remaining films before his death in 1956. Between the three films mentioned above, Mizoguchi has provided the world with three indelible and unforgettable classics, and his reputation as one of Japan’s three central masters is clearly cemented.
The Blu-ray contains an audio commentary from scholar Dudley Andrew that only stretched for the first quarter of the film (I suppose it’s hard to fill a 136-minute film with constant chatter). There is also a fascinating film about Tanaka’s Goodwill tour of the U.S. in 1949, and an audio lecture about Mizoguchi’s visual style (he was simultaneously painterly and totally incidental). If you are a fan of Japanese cinema, this is one of the biggies. Familiarize yourself with Mizoguchi. You owe it to yourself.
Witney Seibold is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel, co-host of The B-Movies Podcast and co-star of The Trailer Hitch. You can read his weekly articles B-Movies Extended, Free Film School and The Series Project, and follow him on “Twitter” at @WitneySeibold, where he is slowly losing his mind. If you want to buy him a gift (and I know you do), you can visit his Amazon Wish List.
