I wanted to like this film and was prepared to. I’d seen three Mizoguchi films that all addressed the concerns of women in a strong, unexpected way, and the title of this film does so explicitly. And there was the added hook that Women of the Night had been filmed in 1948, only three years after the end of WW II and the dismantling of the social structure that had sustained the war, And I knew Mizoguchi understood how to control cinema, especially his own auteur lexicon. I saw the potential for a great film.
So I was disappointed to see how muddled this ambitious, raw, angry, confusing film is. The first jarring element was the character swings of the two sisters, Fusako and Natsuko. Fusako starts as a sweet, traditional mother, but after some devastating news, the next scene has her as a forward, abrasive, hard streetwalker. She stays that for a while before abruptly longing for purity. At one point, the change is so dramatic that I had to stop the DVD and go back to be sure I was looking at the same character. Natusko, too, veers from reluctant hostess to sister savior to hard-core prostitute. These are perfectly good character arcs, but I needed to see more of the connecting points. Even the child Kumiko goes from naïve waif to hard hustler in a cut. She’s terribly abused, but there’s no real trajectory for her character; she’s all cotton at one moment and nails the next.
I couldn’t figure out what the film was getting at with respect to the prostitution and the women who practice it, either. One thing for sure: it’s dangerous, humiliating, harsh and ultimately futile. But I couldn’t understand the film’s perspective. It’s clearly anti-prostitution, but who’s to blame for it? We’ve no real background on that issue after the first few scenes, so we’re left to wonder if it’s a social malaise or a product of patriarchy. And what’s the alternative….life in a vacuous Christian mission? exploitation as married labor? It’s hard to see what Women of the Night was getting at other than that such a life is as inevitable as it is terrible.
I didn’t find the whole film a muddle though. I thought one of the movie’s strong points, ironically enough, was the wonderful focus in the depth of field throughout. In scene after scene, you see all the action in the foreground, midground and background. Everything. It has some of the most visually rich settings of his films I’ve seen so far. And with that great depth of field comes some amazing landscape and settings. Three years after the intensive Allied bombings, Mizoguchi has a wide setting of devastation that he uses throughout the film in these three areas of focus. There are ruined interiors and ruined backgrounds. People live and walk in ruins. And they live in societal ruins. It’s a perfect setting for this bleak, violent, defeated story.
I saw Women of the Night compared to Neorealist film, but it hardly fits the description to me. The craft here is too ragged, and the visceral pain and anger stronger….and more unfocussed…than in the Neorealist work I know.
