#323
Post
by FilmSnob » Tue Dec 28, 2021 6:42 pm
Well I finished Mizoguchi's filmography and these were the Mizo's I liked:
The Water Magician
The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum
The Life of Oharu
Ugetsu
Sansho the Bailiff
Princess Yang Kwei Fei
Street of Shame
Interesting to watch Mizoguchi's development right after finishing Ozu and Shimizu's filmographies. Shimizu came from a very wealthy background, Ozu was middle class, and Mizoguchi proletarian. You can really see that in their work too. Mizoguchi's roots dating back to his shimpa and socialist tendency films from the 1920s.
I liked his silent The Water Magician (1933) and his first masterpiece The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum (1939) from his developmental period. Mizoguchi's voice, of course, is known for his depiction of women's suffering against the patriarchy of society, but these two films feature noble male leads which exalts the sacrifice of the women who love them. As you will see in the rest of this post, I found Mizoguchi's worst films tended to depict weak, passive, or flat, shallow male caricatures that were simply foils for his class and gender warfare polemics.
The war films were the war films, but-- I particularly disliked his version of The 47 Ronin. Not because he excluded any semblance of fighting or the climactic raid, which was well within his artistic license especially given the context of the political times, but because he transformed the last hour of this most hallowed tale of masculine redemption of honor into a minor subplot involving the romantic longings of a 19 year old girl. That gets the Mizoguchi eyeroll from me.
I was surprisingly disappointed with his immediate post war output. With the exception of the venereal Women of the Night (1948), which I didn't exactly like but concede it was effective (Mizoguchi far surpassed this anyway with his similar but far superior Street of Shame. I just hated watching his 1939-1951 films. At first I thought it was because the characters are so badly drawn, especially the men. Kinuyo Tanaka displays quite a bit of range portraying disparate two-dimensional heroines, but there's no depth to any of the writing. Just polemic, incredibly didactic films where the protagonists are helpless victims against the evils of society. Now I still think that, but since Mizoguchi's final late period started right after the end of the Allied Occupation, I can't help but notice that 1939-1951 period corresponds exactly with the censorship enforced on him, first by the Japanese themselves during the war, and then the Americans after the war.
Regardless, The Life of Oharu (1952) was terrific because right in the middle of the film Mizoguchi starts to shed all those trappings that I disliked so much. Mizoguchi's trademark style had been around since the conclusion of his developmental period at the end of the 1930s, but finally him and his screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda returned to personal, individual stories of well-drawn characters. Oharu earns her sympathy as a fully believable woman, yes a victim of the evils of men and society, but she also suffers from several self-inflicted wounds and personal indiscretions; and even when she sorts all that out, she just gets hit with plain bad luck. A truly memorable and tragic arc.
From that point forward was of course Mizoguchi's best work. Ugetsu (1953) the male characters have strong but misguided will. Sansho the Bailiff again all of the things that make Mizoguchi films wonderful, but the male lead has that same determined quality of character as Kikonosuke in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, making the tragic sacrifices of his mother and sister so much more powerful.
Chikamatsu Story (1954) I actually loathed this one as full of coincidences, plotholes, contrived melodrama, Mizoguchi giving into his worst impulses.
On the other hand, I rate Princess Yang Kwei Fei (1955) higher than consensus. Solid, nothing groundbreaking here, you might even call it conservative within the bounds of what Mizoguchi was capable of, but that allowed for the performances to stand out. Machiko Kyo was wonderful. I didn't like Masayuki Mori's emperor that much, but for some reason I always find amusing joy with So Yamamura's supporting roles.
Mizoguchi's final film Street of Shame (1956) might actually be his best film. I can only compare with Tamizo Ishida's all-geisha house chamber drama Flowers Have Fallen (1938). Incredibly well-drawn characters and individual performances by Ayako Wakao, Machiko Kyo, Michiyo Kogure, and others, that made me sympathize with these successful and struggling prostitutes alike. The only thing that held me back from giving this a full 5-star rating was the conservative ending. Funny how I've always thought it was silly when Shakespeare plays ended with a dozen different people killing each other or committing suicide in the final moments, but one of the characters (if you've seen the movie, you know who) really should have died at the end ... there was a certain explosive element of tragedy missing in the conclusion, just my opinion.