This is the most sorrowful movie I have watched, depicting the life of a woman. It opens on a quiet dawn with the main character staring blankly into space while her face is behind a fan and meeting some of her colleagues working as call girls. “It’s hard for a 50-year-old women to pass as 20,” she observes. She mentions the night was not very busy: an old man had taken her to a candle-lit room full of young men. “Look at this painted face!” he shouted at his friends. “Do you still want to buy a woman?” For a woman who has been morally mistreated day in and day out, to be put on such a cruel pedestal is devastating. She has done everything in her power to live her life in a manner that is morally acceptable.
The women gather around a transparent fire that one of their friends has set. u201cI heard you served at the palace,u201d another prostitute comments. u201cWhat has led to your ruin?u201d shrouded by the haze of her thoughts, enabling herself to answer without words, shrugging and saying, u201cDo not ask me about my past.u201d Evades the looking glass, mask, and those who longingly stare through it, and roams into a Buddhist temple. A dissolution of young man’s face into one pristine feature of the Buddha is followed by the scene that will recount Oharu’s life starting from her early years.
Mizoguchi Kenji is known for his commiseration toward women and the social burden inflicted upon them was obsessively paternalistic. Side note: all contemporaries and even, Ozu, beside whom he is often referred, were known for their sympathy toward women. Not unlike his contemporaries, he focused frequently on the story of prostitutes, like in Street of Shame (1956). A claim has been put forward accusing him of spending time in bordellos, not exclusively for the sake of getting laid, but having genuine bonds with the working women and left awestruck with the awareness that his sister, Suzo, who raised him, was sold by their father as a geisha. This is exactly the plight Oharu faces in this cinematic take.
The role is portrayed by Kinuyo Tanaka, who featured in 14 of his films and this one, completed in 1952, helped shift her career away from an early styled as an ingénue toward more complex roles. As Oharu, one of her strengths is her ability to portray the same character over the span of 30 years.
When Oharu's flashback starts, she recalls how her father was a lord who bought her off as a concubine. In the entire court, she was known for her beauty. As a child, Oharu got married at a young age and even had a face-off with the famous novel character Taihou Jinjirou. Every lord wanted her hand and she lived a lavish life until her father’s sudden demise. This eventually made Oharu loose all ‘noble’ status. The faint transformation into a *yujo* from a noble dame threw all the remaining thoughts of respect out of the window and with it her standing in society. Shortly after, her father sold her off to serve as a maid to his abusive aunt who stripped her of any last hints of affection. Reforming this court was where all her resentment grew. Finally, Froebel made her channe another form of acceptance that no child or woman should ever be put through.A false pause from her suffering comes next. The woman settles down peacefully after meeting a nice fellow and fan-maker, only to have him killed. She receives no inheritance. She later tells the head nun at the convent, “All I want is to be a nun and be near to Buddha. ”There is an ambiguous incident in the convent. A man who knew her comes to demand reimbursement for a gift of cloth he had given her, and in a rage she strips off her clothing and throws it at him. Her nudity only exists in the man’s perception, but the revelation of this incident results in her expulsion from the convent.
During all this time, she fantasizes about her son, only to catch a glimpse of him later in life as a grand figure with no awareness of her existence. This brings us back to her current life, which consists of being an unsuccessful, cold, hungry, and desperate prostitute.
While much of the movie is filmed in a traditional manner, including Ozu’s favorite perspective of a person sitting on a tatami mat, Oharu is frequently viewed from an eye-level angle well above the subject. This view, which in frame composition terms, reduces and degrades the subject of the framing towards a more passive role, and Oharu more and more appears as a captive subject of exploration, a subject void of agency who invokes sympathy.
“Life of Oharu,” as written, appears to be some exaggerated work of fiction, but the director did all he could to craft and tell the story without relying on its sensational components.
Each aspect of Oharu’s life is a profound tragedy, carefully curated to build her character. With his meticulous use of costumes and period-appropriate locations, it's as if Oharu's existence is a choreographed performance stepping through life’s stages. The figure of Oharu holds extraordinary amounts of pathos, and is incredibly moving because she is the only one aware of the grand narrative behind her life's secrets: she’s seen as immodest and morally depraved, while in reality, society has deemingly painted her into an unmoving corner, forcing her to unendingly masquerade as a villainess for their own convenience. She is simply stripped of any semblance of compassion.
We watch the film in disbelief. No woman could possibly endure such agony through no action of her own, could she? Mizoguchi does not seem to make any effort into casting any man, not even the father, as having some notion of an evil plan. The men act within the system of norms which is culture offers to them and which have been imposed upon them by the society. The same goes for the fan maker, but with the freedom that stems from his employment, he is granted by society a greater range of options—or more likely, societal indifference.
Mizoguchi Kenji (1898-1956) is today regarded as one of the three greatest Japanese directors alongside Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu. The Kurosawa most ‘westernized’ in their approach, was the first to achieve international popularity with easily understandable films like ‘Rashomon’, ‘The Seven Samurai’, and ‘Yojimbo’. Ozu was thought of as ‘too Japanese’, until the Russo-American critic Donald Richie took a batch of his films to the Venice Film Festival and, as he assumed, they were found to have universal appeal. (It’s my belief that the more specific a film is, the broader its audience is likely to be).
Mizoguchi received accolades in the West as early as Ozu. His “Ugetsu Monogatari” (1953), won at the Venice Film Festival, and the film appeared two times in Sight & Sound magazine’s decade-long poll of the greatest films of all time. It is what got me interested in him in the early 1970s. However, it was “Oharu” that he considered his best, probably because of how personally the themes resonated in his own life.
The Western writing that most notably focuses on Mizoguchi’s works is an essay by Robert Cohen “Why Does Oharu Faint?” as “Kubla Khan” writes about it. “Oharu faints thrice in ‘The Life of Oharu,’ and on all occasions, wakes up feeling kinder and more forgiving... Cohen suggests that for Oharu’s spirit transcendence to be reached, she must ‘abandon her gender identity and sexuality,’ and in some way, her triumph is only pyrrhic.” The critic also states that this “is far more captivating than any spiritual rationale explaining how Oharu became a saintly figure, and her fainting spell is more a physical and psychological surrender to the awful life that she has led up to that point.”
The exceptional directors in Japan were already fascinated with the women in their society’s lives decades before feminism became a movement in the West. Of all the Japanese films I have watched, not one woman is as unforgettable and tragic as Oharu.
The Criterion edition of the movie can be streamed on Hulu Plus, while a non-Criterion version, which is fairly enjoyable, is available on YouTube in nine segments. “Ugetsu” and “Sansho the Bailiff” are also featured in my collection of Great Movies alongside titles from Ozu and Kurosawa, which I have integrated into the collection.
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