This is it! The final movie in this Criterion Eclipse blog series.
Once again, this Mizoguchi film veers towards kitsch, and I’m not sure why anybody would hail these films as, well, anything to er hail. Is it just because of the exoticism? That seems crass, so I’m sure not, but it’s hard to see anything else to recommend these movies — pedestrian cinematography, preposterous plots, and unconvincing pacing. The performances are pretty good, but with the framing it can be hard to tell sometimes.
The final scene is properly horrifying, though, so:
This is a depressing, brutal movie, and I can’t imagine why the American censors didn’t stop it at the time.
Again, as with Sisters of the Gion, Mizoguchi is making a film about how prostitution sucks. In that film, it sucked because men are assholes (but the women should have known that, is my reading). In this one, the prostitutes themselves are barely human (in many scenes), clawing away at and abusing each other.
It’s… so unremittingly grim that it turns into kitsch.
Oh, I forgot to write anything here… it’s mostly because this is kinda really uninspiring. It’s a very straightforward story — there’s almost nothing here.
But I can see why it was a success — it’s a nice little tragedy.
The final Criterion Eclipse box set! The end is nigh!
So only four more posts to go in this blog series.
This is kinda fun — virtually all other Japanese films I’ve seen in this blog series has cinematography that’s so composed, one way or another. With Ozu everything is tidy and symmetrical, and Naruse is never able to resist the impulse to dolly the camera up into everybody’s nostrils, but here everything seems, well, sloppy and natural.
It’s refreshing.
Even the lighting sometimes looks natural.
This is quite amusing, and feels fresh and unfussy.
Uhm uhm, I think I have to disagree with the liner notes on the DVD — it says that the film is on the side of the prostitutes sorry I mean geishas — but it’s kinda not? The story is about a young prostitute breaking the rules: She “cheats” on her client with another guy, and then he basically breaks her bones, and the movie ends with the scene above.
So while Mizoguchi may be sympathetic to their plight, the movie is saying “if you step out of line, you get beaten up, and ‘the system’ is to blame, not that creep who crippled a prostitute because he was in a snit”.
The Japanese kept on making silent movies for way longer than was reasonable… but this is the final one on the Criterion Eclipse box sets.
I mean, in a way it’s nice — some male Japanese actors have a tendency to grunt a lot and talk way below their natural ranges, which is annoying to listen to — but it seems wilfully perverse to continue doing silent films while the cinematography is getting really technically accomplished.
Oh, once again I’ve been wrong-footed by the casting… he’s supposed to be like 18? It’s weird — they have no problem casting children as children, but all teenagers look like this in these Naruse films.
Anyway, of all these Naruse films, this is the least compelling one — it’s like nothing’s happening, and it takes a long time not happening. It’s the longest one of these five films, too.
Hm… OK, I read the liner notes on the DVD now: This movie is based on a newspaper serial about a tea hostess, and none of the directors at Shochiku (the studion) wanted to do this movie. Naruse was promised that he could any movie he wanted if he just took this one, and he did.
Shochiku apparently reneged on the promise, so that didn’t happen, and Naruse left. But watching this, I’m wondering whether the studio just wanted him to leave, because this film just doesn’t work.
But as always, there’s interesting shots here — I guess they kept themselves amused.
And then there’s shots that you’d think would be no-brainers, and they look all kinds of meh.
