September 27: The Hedgehog/Le hérisso (2009 -- Mona Achache)

★★★★

September 26: Street of Shame/Akasen chitaii (1956 -- Kenji Mizoguchi)

★★★★

There’s an awful lot to like in this film; it may be my favorite of the Mizoguchi series I’ve been watching. 

Street of Shame is about a band of women, prostitutes, who work together and become a team despite their various, and often competing, interests.  It’s a refreshing take on the many band-of-men movies I’ve seen lately, and one that subverts the bonded guys types of film by focusing on gender-specific concerns.  The women in this band focus on fathers, getting married, husbands, and children, all concerns that I’ve rarely if ever seen in films about teams of men.  Not bad for 1956, I think.

You have to suspect this film has some of its origin in Mizoguchi’s earlier Women of the Night.  Both open with a panoramic scan of an urban area before heading into the hardscrabble street to greet the characters.  And there is harshness and brutality here as in the earlier film.  An older woman is dumped by her john when he chooses a younger woman, a son learns of his mother’s profession and rejects her even though she has sent him money his entire life, one woman marries to discover her husband only wants her so he can have help at work, and a tricked businessman severely beats one of the women.  The women also face hypocrisy and exploitation as the one woman’s father begs her to leave the brothel although he himself is often a client.  And the brothel owners keep their workers under a crushing load of debt so they won’t leave.  It’s a hard life.

Mizoguchi takes Street of Shame beyond his early, unfocussed Women of the Night, though, by showing all the women in this film in some depth.  And there’s character development in each of the women here, each with her own character arc and each growing though the movie.  And though the women face ordeals, they find some redemption in their profession.  One woman realizes there is less hypocrisy in the brothel than in the family, and another discovers she can make more money in the brothel than in working with her husband.  One even manages to put enough money together to leave the brothel and start her own business, shrewdly targeting her former work mates as customers, too.  The women find an independence in prostitution that they don’t find outside.

There is a lot of beauty in Street of Shame, too.  Mizoguchi uses shorter takes than I saw in many of his films, but the frame is chock full of information because of the elegant depth of field .  Foreground, middle field and background are all often in focus, giving us lots of visual information to enjoy.  The opening scenes of the brothel decorated for Christmas there in Japan are perfect examples of Mizouchi filling the screen with interesting things to look at.  And perhaps suggesting an American connection to the practice of prostitution in Japan.

This is a very well-done, warm, humanistic view of life in a brothel.  Such a life isn’t filled with one bliss after another, though, and we see both its good and bad sides.  Though the stories of a team of sex workers,  Street of Shame is a mature, controlled, engaging  interpretation of this unique segment of society.

September 25: Women of the Night/Yoru no onnatachi (1948 -- Kenji Mizoguchi)

★★

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.  

September 24: Sisters of the Gion/Gion no shimai (1936 -- Kenji Mizoguchi)

★★★★

Mizoguchi did Sisters of the Gion the same year as Osaka Elegy, but it looks like a very different movie.  It has the same compression of story I noticed in the other two Mizoguchi films I’ve seen, and there’s the same theme of women’s lives being hard because of men, but the camera here is different from how it is in Osaka Elegy.

This film has the mobile camera of Ugetsu.  The camera follows characters down alleys in Kyoto and moves around the room during conversations as characters do.  It greets people as they enter a room.  It follows people from one room into another.  Like in all the Mizoguchi films, the shots in Sisters of the Gion are long, but this film has the camera mobility that Osaka Elegy lacks and that makes that film slow.

In fact, Sisters of the Gion is generally more cinematic than Osaka Elegy.  The film opens with a long take of an estate auction as the camera slowly pans right, from auction background to auctioneer to bidders to consignors.  This long take introduces us to the situation of Furusawa, the patron of one of the titular sisters, Umekichi.  He’s bankrupt, and this single take establishes that situation and segues seamlessly into the background that will underlie one of the main storylines.  It’s great cinema.  Another interesting cinema moment occurs when the injured Omocha is brought into her home.  The camera follows her slow progress out of one room and across another until it stops when she goes behind a screen.  At that point, the camera lingers on the screen as we hear the conversation going on behind it.  With this scene, I can imagine Mizoguchi working out how to use the new cinema element of sound with his preferred cinema expression of long takes.  It works in this situation.

Sisters of the Gion is also a transition from the silent-inspired melodrama of Osaka Elegy into a more realistic aesthetic.  Sisters of the Gion is a modern story of modern women trying to make their way in a hard social situation.  There are brutally-honest elements like poverty, prostitution and violence, and the harsh ending of the film – realist Omocha and romantic Umekichi both broken by men – is far too gut-kicking for melodrama.  The pain here is visceral and powerful.

It interesting that Mizoguchi could do Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion in the same year, using many elements of the same cinema language to explore a similar theme, and yet he produced such different films.  His more complex cinema language here and his more realistic approach to the theme makes Sisters of Gion a film that a modern audience can respond to more strongly. 

September 23: Osaka (Naniwa) Elegy/Naniwa erej (1936 -- Kenji Mizoguchi)

★★★

I liked Ugetsu so much that I decided to check out some other films by Kenji Mizoguchi.  I was lucky enough to find that the Eclipse series has a box set of them called Kenji Mizoguchi’s Fallen Women with several of his most important films.  So I started 20 years before Ugetsu with Osaka Elegy.

The blurbs said that Osaka Elegy is the beginning of Mizoguchi’s strongest films, and its ending alone would qualify it as such.  After all the hardship, misunderstanding, and social ostracism that the heroine has encountered, the film ends with her standing on a bridge looking out at the water with refuse floating in it.  She asks a doctor she knows why she’s bad, and the doctor says no one could say.  Since she’d lost everything by then – family, respect, fiancé, job – I expected a discrete plunge.  Instead, Ayako looks DIRECTLY at the camera and marches straight for the viewer.  WOW!  This woman is not going to be cowed by hypocrites in family or society.  It is an amazing ending to a film.

The theme here is familiar after Ugetsu, though Osaka Elegy predates the Ugetsu by 17 years.  Ineffective men in her life force Ayako into ruin in the same way the two men in Ugetsu set the stage for the downfall of their wives.  Here, however, Ayako quickly learns that she has to be strong and not only cope but also thrive in her male-created situation.  She gives up her first patron after his wife catches them, hoodwinks her second paramour, and moves on after her fiancé betrays her.  After her family rejects her despite all she’s done to help the men resolve their financial problems, she strikes out on her own.  This woman is far more powerful than those in Ugetsu, and again, I found myself thinking of the the silent era and its strong women like Lulu in Pandora’s Box.

That shouldn’t be a surprise since Mizoguchi made Osaka Elegy only nine years after The Jazz Singer brought in sound and its attendant effect on film.  Osaka Elegy is far more like a silent movie than Ugetsu is.  We still have the long takes that are a Mizoguchi hallmark, but the camera hardly moves at all here, unlike its glide and sweep in the later film.  The long takes with the static camera create a theatrical effect in scenes like the early dinner at Ayako’s house, the complicated exchange in theater hall, and the bed scene with Ayako and wife of her lover.  Later Mizoguchi will keep the long takes but move the camera more.

Like in Ugetsu, though, Mizoguchi uses his still photography eye here.  Osaka Elegy is filled with beautiful images of Deco Japan like the interior of the department store and the exterior of the apartment building.  And the hugely long scene of the puppet performance, fascinating in itself even without the double-entendre of the theatrical story vis-a-vis the movie narrative.  And the great opening shot of the company owner’s wife asleep in her bed, her head beside that of her dog. If I can see Mizoguchi’s love of image this early, I can predict that I’ll see it in his other films.

The last similarity between later Mizoguchi and Osaka Elegy is his use of melodrama.  The poor Ayako does her duty as a daughter and family member, but things continually work out to her detriment every time she tries, generally thanks to a string of bad luck you’d only find in melodrama.  A happenstance arrival of the wife.  The doctor going to the wrong address.  And there is sad irony, too, in scenes such as the one where Ayako’s boyfriend finally proposes….after she’s chosen the life of a concubine.  There’s one O’Henry touch after another in this film.

Overall, this is a lesser film than Ugetsu.  It has great visuals, but the static camera bogs the film down, and the invariably predictable story doesn’t create much suspense.  Osaka Elegy is certainly a good film, but its best elements mostly predict what Mizoguchi will do so much better in the future.

September 22: Ugetsu/Ugetsu monogatari (1953 -- Kenji Mizoguchi)

★★★★★
A friend and I got some sushi and saki and settled in to watch Ugetsu, thinking of fall, Halloween and ghosts.  Sort of missed that target, but it's a great film with many surprises.  It seems almost retro for a 1953 film, and I kept thinking of silent films while I was watching it.

People talk about Kenji Mizoguchi’s long takes and his camera work, so I shouldn’t have been surprised to find the cinematography so outstanding.  But I was.  Mizoguchi’s camera doesn’t blink; when Genjuro and Miyagi are stoking the kiln, the camera just runs and runs, following the two as they move from interacting with each other to working on the kiln and back again.  A scene like this would have been cut into several pieces by most contemporary directors, but here, the camera moves along with the characters or draws back for a wider view, and we see the entire action in all its specificity.  I found a certain satisfaction in seeing the completeness of the action, and the continual use of this style through the length of Ugetsu creates a rhythm that seems leisurely and intimate even as the story rips from one episode to another.  One of the more lyrical takes of the film is the scene of Genjuro’s arrival at Lady Waksa’s home.  Here, the camera starts with a stable distance shot and moves in as Genjuro goes from one part of the villa to another, always framing the image to follow Genjuro as though he were walking through a series of well-composed still shots.  There is bonus beauty here between the advance of the narrative, the beauty of the image, and lyricism of the camera movement.  This is what I like so much about Ugetsu – the simultaneous levels of beauty in so many shots.

And there are moments of beauty the film that seem more about visual impression than narrative push.  Genjuro’s extended arrival at the villa falls into this category, as do some of the scenes of Genjuro and Lady Wakasa cavorting.  And the eerie beauty of the families crossing the lake as the boatwoman sings isn’t necessary to the story; Genjuro and Tobei could have left their wives and set out on the trip alone like they did the first time, but Ugetsu would not have had one of its most eerie, beautiful moments.

This same scene brings to mind another of my pleasures in the film, my being uncertain of the reality of what I was watching.  Because of the stylized camera and décor, there were many moments of pleasure as I tried to choose between reality and subjectivity.   As a boat emerges from the mist during the crossing, we don’t know what to think until the injured man in it explains that he isn’t a ghost and grounds the viewer’s uncertainty into a realistic framework.  Later, Genjuro sees his wife looking at the kimonos he is thinking of buying, but we quickly realize that’s an illusion.  And into this visual uncertainty walks the imposing Lady Wakasa.  A big part of the rest of the film trembles on the edge of real and unreal, a great experience of pleasure, until reality is re-confirmed….almost.  And what great ghosts Medieval Japanese noblewomen make, with their delicate, mannered, artificial movements and over-the-top dress.

The tone and theme of the movie also remind me of silent cinema.  The slightly overstated aspect of Lady Wakasa recall Murnau’s Dracula to me, and each of these supernatural beings interacts with a real, human counterpart.  There’s also a strong element of silent melodrama Ugetsu.  There’s the rape of Ohama and her fall into prostitution, her encounter with Tobei and their reconciliation, the old woman who aids Miyagi with food for her son and the subsequent attack on the mother and child by the soldiers.  These are only a few of the melodramatic elements of the film that recall the artificiality of silents.

Even the principle theme of the movie feels affected by the 20s suffrage movement more than by the gender roles of the 50s.  Ohama’s rape is a direct result of Tobei’s obsession with becoming a samurai, and in case you don’t catch that, the film repeats it several times.  Likewise, Miyagi ‘s fate proceeds from Genjuro’s single-minded determination to make more money, and we have a village chief to tell us that, too.  Ugetsu shows that men do real harm to women’s lives, to the lives of women they love, by not considering the women when they make decisions.  I find this a remarkably progressive theme to build a Japanese movie around in 1953.

Ugetsu ends with a showstopper that unites the elements of Mizoguchi’s style, the titillating balance of real/unreal, the melodrama and the theme into one scene.  It is a concluding masterstroke, and one that makes me wonder if the Jerry Zucker didn’t have this in mind when he put together that famous scene with Demi Moore and Patrick Swazye in Ghost.

September 21: Oceans Thirteen (2007 -- Steven Soderbergh)

★★★