THE LIFE OF OHARU (Saikaku ichidai onna)
A-
Japan (136 mi) 1952
d: Kenji Mizoguchi
Princess Morning Glory
answered the nobleman
She plucked the
flowers and offered them
For a long time
She stares pensively
at the flower in her hand
Can this be real
It is her fate to wither
in the shade
Day and night
She stares at the
deutzia blossoms
They fill her heart
By good fortune she is
given to the Imperial palace
What a lucky flower
How enviable, how
lucky you are
Reluctantly she offers
the flower in her hand
But this flower is only
the go-between
In fact, your face is
the flower that captured my heart.
—musician singing in Bunraku puppet play
My sad fate is pitiful
indeed
My pillow is soaked
with tears
This painful world of
transience
How pitiful I am
I’m growing old
This life full of
regrets
Will evaporate
Like the morning dew
—street beggar singing, eventually becoming Oharu
Mizoguchi considered this to be his finest work, his first
to gain international renown following Kurosawa’s Venice prize-winning film
RASHOMON (1950) in 1951, making him a cult hero with the Parisian Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, winner of the
Venice Festival International Award in 1952, based on a 17th century novel by
Saikaku Ohara, The Life of an Amorous Woman, but
differing substantially. Saikaku’s novel
is a collection of episodes narrated by an elderly nun recalling her decline
from a promising youth, ending with a scene of a prostitute entering a temple
and hallucinating the faces of former lovers in the idols there. This film is a
harrowing chronicle of the oppression of women, following the misfortunes of a
single woman, Oharu played by Kinuyo Tanaka, the daughter of a respected
samurai, whose fall from grace is filmed in slow, meticulous detail, using
hauntingly beautiful compositions, showing remarkable insights into Oharu’s
psychology, balancing social criticism with serene formal beauty. Mizoguchi earned a reputation of being a
“Stroheim” on the set, firing his assistant Uchikawa Seichiro when he
complained about last minute changes of studio-built houses, also of the
replica built for the garden of Kyoto’s Koetsu temple. With ornate use of historical costumes and
signature tracking shots and long takes, achieving formal perfection,
compressing into a single shot what might normally take two or three different takes,
making extraordinary use of period architecture, with a heavy reliance on ritual,
where submissive gestures such as bowing often define one’s character, the film
is actually driven by the expressive music written by Ichirô Saitô, using Bunraku
puppet theater percussion and flute, where the mournful lyrics heard throughout
from pieces of songs offer the poetic themes of the film.
THE LIFE OF OHARU is a sad and forlorn tale of sin and
retribution imposed by an unforgiving feudal society that views love outside
one’s class more as ill-advised lust during this historical period, a heavily
repressive society for those who marry outside their aristocratic
nobility. When Oharu falls in love with
a lowly page, Katsunosuke (an unrecognizable Toshirô Mifune), the Imperial
family is so outraged she is banished in court, her husband beheaded in
disgrace, and her family permanently exiled from Kyoto. With no other means of income, her father is
forced to sell Oharu into prostitution where she becomes a courtesan in Edo
period Japan. Just a few years before
his death four years later, apparently driven to produce greatness after
Kurosawa’s recognition a year earlier, this is the first of three masterpieces
starring Tanaka that Mizoguchi directed in the early 1950’s, followed shortly
afterwards by Ugetsu
(Ugetsu monogatari) (1953) and Sansho
the Bailiff (Sanshô dayû) (1954), where in SANSHO, perhaps the director’s
finest, it reiterates familiar themes where a wife is sold into prostitution
while her children are sold into slavery.
Mizoguchi was heavily influenced during childhood by his family’s
decision to sell his older sister into geisha house prostitution, where the
subject of women's suffering is fundamental in all his work, none more so than
this film which in effect mirrors the life of his own sister, thoroughly
exploring the humiliating ramifications of a woman’s downward descent. Tanaka is nothing less than brilliant, where
the psychological depth of her performance continuously adds unspoken
complexity, becoming the dramatic heart of the film without ever relying on melodramatic
sentiment, following up her performance by becoming Japan’s second female
director, after Sakane Tazuko, in a film called LOVE LETTER (1953).
Told nearly entirely in flashback as Oharu reflects upon her
life, Mizoguchi examines with some scrutiny the effects of male dominated rule,
where often marginalized, self-sacrificing women play a redemptive role in
Japanese society, yet Oharu is cruelly informed in no uncertain terms that she
can be “bought like a fish on a chopping board.” Reduced to material goods that can be bought
and sold, every woman in town is subject to an intense personal inspection when
Lord Matsudaira (Toshiaki Konoe), whose wife is barren, is seeking a concubine
for the purpose of bearing an heir to the family name. The exact specifications desired make this one
of the more pathetic, but also amusingly exaggerated sequences in the
film. Oharu meets a completely different
kind of inspection from the Lord’s wife, Hisako Yamane, who coolly dismisses
her at first at first sight in a beautifully extended shot, but her enraged
jealousy is plain enough to see, carrying into an operatic Bunraku sequence,
after which she produces a son, but is quickly told to pack her bags as she is
“draining” the Lord’s energy. The film
is not entirely downbeat, where some of the novel’s comic elements have been
retained, such as a big-spending counterfeiter who visits the brothel, or an
overly proud woman whose wig is cleverly stolen by a cat, but the tone of the
film mostly goes from bad to worse. This
cycle of temporary appreciation before being ultimately discarded repeats
throughout the film, as this pattern nearly defines the life of a prostitute,
whose value is exceedingly high during their blossoming youth, but fades
quickly as they age, “As the story goes, the morning's pretty face is a corpse
by evening.” Finding a way to heighten
the reality of every scene, expressing tremendous sympathy for women, Mizoguchi’s
film composition was never more stunning, as the film exposes a crisis of
conscience in postwar Japan, examining Oharu’s painstaking mistreatment as a
way of seeing their way through some kind of reconciliation and national accountability,
using socially relevant material to examine historical patterns of behavior
that could use a revised outlook, replacing ingrained social injustice with a
modernized, more equitable vision towards the future.
