A tragic riches-to-rags fable set in 17th century Kyoto documenting a young noblewoman's fall from grace. With unflinching realism and atmospheric detail, this film established Mizoguchi as one of Japan's greatest directors.
In 1951, a year after the USA handed Japan back to the Japanese, a 40-year-old Akira Kurosawa won first prize at the Venice film festival with Rashomon. Mizoguchi, twe... more >
In 1951, a year after the USA handed Japan back to the Japanese, a 40-year-old Akira Kurosawa won first prize at the Venice film festival with Rashomon. Mizoguchi, twelve years older, announced wryly that one had to be at least 50 to make a masterpiece, and he dedicated the rest of his life to making one masterpiece after another until he died in 1956. The first one in the series was The Life of Oharu, winning in Venice in 1952. Mizoguchi had wanted to film Saikaku’s 17th C. play about prostitution for many years, and when he was given the green light by a minor company, he set about chronicling the life of the daughter of a merchant who falls into the clutches of an aristocrat, is bought and sold by a series of powerful men and ends up on the street. Mizoguchi used the story for his own purposes, making the most powerful statement of a theme that had informed many of his pre-War films: how the spineless and brutal cupidity of men who abuse women contrasts with the incorruptible beauty and strength of the women they abuse. As his heroine, Mizoguchi cast the extraordinary Kinuyo Tanaka, an actress – and later one of Japan’s first women film directors – who had starred in the two films leading up to Oharu: Miss Oyu and The Lady of Musashino (both 1951). He shot Oharu in a bombed out park under extremely difficult circumstances, but his dedication, even obsession to get everything right on that film became legendary. The result is one of the most eerily beautiful works in film history, with sinuous sequence shots that provide a kind of visual music to accompany the events in the story, modulating its moods and punctuating it with astonishingly beautiful images. < less
