Japan 1936
bw 71 min.
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
CLV: $49.95 - available
           1 disc, catalog # CC1373L
VHS: available from Home Vision Cinema
Kenji Mizoguchi departed abruptly from his earlier sentimental films
into a world of acute realism with Osaka Elegy. Boldly
critiquing the position of women in contemporary Japanese society, the
film examines a young woman's victimization and descent into
prostitution. Together, Mizoguchi's direction and Isuzu Yamada's
powerful performance create sorrowful, timeless poetry.
An incongruously brisk and romantic big band melody plays to
Osaka Elegy's first shot, a neon-studded skyline; it gives the
impression, as Mizoguchi intends, of a thoroughly modern metropolis,
the flowering, perhaps, of a thoroughly modern civilization. But no
sooner does the director float that illusion before us than he reveals
a society old in its cruel pragmatism, feudal hierarchy and its system
of intricately-linked obligations. Caught precisely at the juncture of
the two worlds, his heroine Ayako--bright, hopeful, and innocently
daring, with her lipstick, cigarettes and jaunty hats--is brought down
through faithful adherence to the most ancient of Japanese values:
giri, the lifelong obligation one owes parents and family
members, the obligation that can never adequately be repaid.
A detail of Kenji Mizoguchi's life that is seldom left out of any
biographical note is the fact that his older sister was sold into
prostitution when he was a child. The practice was not uncommon among
poverty-stricken Asian families, and while horrifying enough, the
boy's future was linked to her bondage. After the death of their
parents she supported him, and her eventual marriage to a wealthy
patron made his education possible. According to the tenets of Japan's
institutionalized sexism, the sacrifice of the less-valued girl child
for the well-being of a son would have been taken for granted. But the
themes and meaning of the director's entire body of work attest that
for him at least, it never was. Over his long career, through more
than 80 films, Mizoguchi would constantly champion women wronged and
discarded: Osaka Elegy, Sisters of Gion, A Woman of
Osaka, A Geisha, and Street of Shame. His portrayal,
with merciless depth, of the workings of a society that nurtured male
privilege and sanctioned second-class citizenship for women, suggests
a sensibility on the cutting edge of giri.
In Osaka Elegy, Mizoguchi's visual composition evokes, and
then subtly undermines, a milieu in which men maintain control and
women serve and wait. This kingdom of men is a potent illusion,
constructed like a beautiful toy made of sliding screens, paper walls,
and thin partitions, the interior environments appearing maze-like and
timeless through the director's use of deep focus and long
shots. Women bow, kneel, and walk behind. But illusion works both
ways, and even as Mizoguchi sets his male authority figures to loom in
the foreground of his shots, it is often to shroud their features in
darkness or to otherwise compromise their power. When Ayako's would-be
sweetheart Nishimura makes a call at her family home, back lighting
gives him an impressive shadow on the half-open screen of the door,
but the towering shadow only makes the man himself small and
inconsequential, providing Mizoguchi's first clue to his true
character.
It is simultaneously demanded that Ayako perform as obedient
daughter, responsible sister, dutiful employee, and appropriately
chaste prospective wife. These obligations are irreconcilably in
conflict with each other in the world in which she lives. Her choices
are to preserve her respectability by taking no action--which would be
unfilial--or to save her father and enjoy the skewed freedom of an
outcast. The results of either are much the same, and Mizoguchi
reveals that the constraint of the home is hardly different from that
of Ayako's situation, as a kept woman in a sleek apartment where the
windows are symbolically barred.
Between our first glimpse of her, impatiently caged in a
switchboard operator's cubicle at Asai Pharmaceutical, and the last
shot, the film's stylistically jarring one-and-only close-up of her
face, Ayako loses the fight for freedom with respectability. The
grasping father, the selfish brother, and the timid suitor have
declared no compromise between the purity of their feminine ideal and
the cravenness of their expectations. Reflections of the neon lights
in the film's opening are finally seen glittering around floating
refuse at a bridge where Ayako contemplates her fate. In the hands of
many another director, such a shot might be trite. Mizoguchi's
matter-of-fact symmetry render it right and achingly poignant.
--Barbara Scharres
CREDITS
Screenplay by Yoshikata Yoda
Photography by Minoru Miki
Original story and direction by Kenji Mizoguchi
ABOUT THE TRANSFER
Osaka Elegy was transferred from an optical print interpositive negative. While
there are many scratches and problems with the print, we believe that these are
the best possible elements available.