The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna)

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.

The Wages of Fear (Le Salaire de la Peur)

THE WAGES OF FEAR (Le Salaire de la Peur)          B+                  

France  Italy  (131 mi)  1953    French restoration (156 mi)  Director’s Cut (148 mi)   

d:  Henri-Georges Clouzot 

In the manner of GREED (1924) or THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE (1948), this is a film that pits men against their most primal instincts, themselves, pitiless victims who are tragically unable to control their baser instincts, set against a larger canvas of enveloping darkness that is all but waiting to envelop them—capitalism.  Like an entryway to Hell, the film opens in a godforsaken, backwater town in the middle of nowhere, supposedly somewhere in South America, a place one could legitimately call the end of the road, filled with penniless, out-of-work men, mostly European exiles with expired or non-existing visa’s lining the streets desperate for money and a ticket out of there, instead sitting on their hands in a kind of involuntary purgatory of the down and out, a way station where there’s no telling how long they’ve been stuck there like prisoners.  Set in two parts, where the initial scenes have the claustrophobic feel of men continually getting on each other’s nerves, a hopeless and monotonous life where day after day nothing ever changes, where perhaps the only consolation is the pretty barmaid, played of course, by the director’s wife Véra Clouzot (actually born in Brazil), the object of every man’s desires, yet continually mistreated by the sleazy bar owner who treats her like property and Mario (Yves Montand), who she actually cares for.  When a white-suited big shot from Paris arrives into town, Mr. Jo (Charles Varnel, penniless like the rest of them), milking it for all it’s worth, as yet to be exposed as a fraud, he strikes up a friendship with Mario, as they are both French con men at heart.     

What transpires next is the kicker, as a seedy representative from an American oil company arrives with armed guards and is looking to hire experienced truck drivers for a delicate mission hauling 200 gallons of highly explosive nitroglycerin over 300 miles of rocky, mountainous terrain.  It seems a handful of men have already died and nearly a dozen more injured in a massive oil rig fire, a little known fact the company wants kept secret to avoid a public relations disaster.  More to the point, a.) the oil company has trucks but no shock absorbers or safety equipment, b.) nitroglycerin is highly unstable and explodes if shaken or spilled, but c.) is needed to put out the oil rig fire, as a carefully induced explosion can suck the oxygen out of the fire.  Oh, and the company is willing to pay $2000 to any man who can deliver the goods without getting blown to bits.  Despite being a suicidal mission, every man in town lines up for the job and are angry about being turned away.  The company hires four drivers for two trucks, a Corsican (Yves Montand), a Parisian (Charles Vanel), a German (Peter Van Eyck) and an Italian (Folco Lolli), where those turned away are angry, knowing this is their only ticket out of town, where one of the rejected drivers commits suicide while another may be murdered so that the Parisian can take his place.  From the outset, it’s a dirty business where you have to resort to any means just to have a chance to get yourself killed, and with luck, survive.  The trucks pull out in the dead of night, where what follows is a highly charged suspense thriller where the director delights in placing unforeseen obstacles in their path, upping the ante in exposing just what men are willing to do for the money. 

Turning into a truck lover’s dream, where we follow trucks and nothing but trucks for the last hour and a half, where at any moment catastrophe awaits, this also becomes a battle of nerves and wits that plays out in the minds of the drivers.  Sitting in the self-enclosed driver’s seat, the conversation resembles an existentialist play like Sartre’s No Exit, as you can’t predict what’s in the twisted minds of these desperados, where both sets of drivers maniacally push the other to the limit, introducing daredevil tactics that only tighten the screws of the already unbearable tension, as they continually tempt death throughout the journey.  Adapted by Clouzot and Jérôme Géronimi from the novel by Georges Arnaud, this is a nailbiter of a movie, unusual for the adventure format as mostly nothing happens, but the anticipation cleverly instilled in the audience’s minds is searingly intense.  The bravado of the men comes into play, where Montand turns into a kind of reckless hotshot as his partner Vanel wilts under pressure, visualizing every rock and crevice along the road, while the other pair barely know one another at the outset and are highly suspicious, refusing to be undermined by the other’s lack of will or sheer incompetancy, but become fast friends, brought closer together by sharing the danger and the difficulty, where they eventually learn to respect each another.  Not so Montand and Varnel, where they are continually at odds with one another.  Overwhelmingly bleak and exhausting, the fatalistic atmosphere of doom is everpresent, stuck in one of the more barren landscapes ever devised for a film, occasionally broken up by moments of levity, where a nice touch thrown into the mix is Clouzot’s incessant use of cigarettes, as these guys continually light up in front of such volatile explosives, much like casually smoking around a gas pump, where any spark could set off a massive explosion.  And in this artificially devised waiting game, Clouzot does not disappoint.      

The Trial of Joan of Arc (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc)

THE TRIAL OF JOAN OF ARC (Procès de Jeanne d'Arc)                 B                     

France  (65 mi)  1961  d:  Robert Bresson

Bresson, like Carl Dreyer before him, had notorious difficulties obtaining financing for films, according to film critic Andrew Sarris.  It has been said that “such intransigent individualists as Buñuel and Stroheim seem like Dale Carnegies by comparison.  At least Buñuel and Stroheim could promise the titillation of shock and sacrilege; Dreyer, like Bresson, could offer nothing but austerity and eternity.”  By paring away the irrelevant, “flash and fluff” that pads most movies, they hope to lay bare the human essence of the story, or as Bresson himself once wrote:  “You have to drain the pond to catch the fish.”  Certainly this rarely seen film is one of the most extreme examples of Bresson’s spiritual realism, his de-dramatizing technique that attempts to capture the actual tone and form of the original event, Joan of Arc's 1431 trial by the English for heresy at Rouen, the seat of the English occupation government in France, and her subsequent execution, using as a basis the actual historical trial records.  That being said, this a most peculiar film, largely due to the complete impassivity of the actors on the screen.  It is startling just how undramatic, unemotional, and uninvolved they are, just the antithesis of Dreyer’s 1928 silent film, perhaps one of the greatest films of all time, THE PASSION OF JOAN OF ARC, which features extreme close ups revealing extraordinary passion and human emotion.  So while that was probably one of the motivations to differentiate this film, it may not work for everyone and some may call it a failed experiment, while others may call it visionary.

Bresson makes excellent use of the thundering sound of the military tympany drum, which is meant to be intimidating when heard, used exquisitely here at both the beginning and end of the film, almost as if it is a clear reflection of the unspoken voice of God.  While the austerity of the film is severe, continually showing Joan subject to harsh treatment and condemnation, with cries of “Burn the witch” heard offscreen throughout, what’s perhaps forgotten is Joan was a simple farm girl, only 19 and illiterate, who couldn’t even sign her name, using a cross instead, yet she was resolute and unwavering, holding her own without the aid of counsel against the finest educated judges and lawyers from England, demonstrating a remarkable intellect.  Her judges couldn’t fathom that she could realize the divine by avoiding the church’s aid and instruction, feeling compelled to lecture her about religious faith, testing her mettle under dire circumstances, forcing her to show them her divinity.  Despite using actual transcripts, what the film doesn’t show is the duration of the trial, how the many months of relentless personal assault both in court followed by more interrogation sessions inside her prison cell, where she was continually spied upon by her captors, eventually took its toll and physically wore her down.  Of interest, Florence Delay, the university student that played Joan went on the write novels and narrate Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), eventually elected to the Académie Française in 2000. 

Bresson’s film is a perfect example of Brechtian theater, which, of interest, was a rebellion against the German emotional expressionist theater of the 20’s by attempting to destroy any dramatic illusion of reality, making it apparent to the audience that they were not witnessing real events happening before their eyes at that very moment, but were instead sitting in a theater listening to an account of things that happened in the past in a certain time in a certain place.  Brecht’s epic theater was strictly historical, reminding the audience that they were getting a report of past events, very much in a documentary manner.  So Brecht eliminated stage decor, suspense leading to a dramatic climax, and any audience identification with the characters on stage, allowing no emotional connection, creating a distance between them, enabling the audience to view the action with a detached and critical spirit, to see familiar things in a different light.  This is theater of reason, not theater of emotion, or unreason.  While this may work in theory, it all remains pretty grim, and by the end Joan is engulfed in smoke and fire, while a dove lands and then flies away.  The final image reveals a burnt stake with chains on the ground, smoke rises, and there is a final abrupt strike of the drum.  Dreyer’s last shot showed Joan burning, where off in the corner one can see a cross, while Bresson’s last shot is a still shot of the stake, smoldering.  The film won the Special Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1962.