Kenji Mizoguchi, with another elegy on human suffering. The focus is on a young woman, but with an eye on the larger social world of organized injustice that expects a woman to be the image of a woman.
A wide panorama of a cruel, patriarchal Japan emerges: servile men and women, obedient vassals to absent lords, bow their heads to the most icy whims, cold, selfish fathers sell their daughters to pay off a loan, fragile wives cower fearful that they might lose the affections of their disinterested husbands, snotty owners of upscale establishments crawl at the sight of money even if it comes by a peasant's hand, prayer is a mock ritual that comes before or after the most debasing acts. Youth and beauty are minutely groomed to be a pleasant diversion for money and power, and are finally banished from sight when the serve no more use.
It is all meant to work as an expose on the harsh realities behind the cherry-blossomed idylls of medieval Japan, a world so completely controlled that only a cat, a supernatural agent, can expose its ugliness. It is educating to see, no doubt, but this function does not interest me overmuch. The single-minded focus on critique inadvertently irons out some of the complexities of a more elaborate world.
One it preserves, therein lies the film's power for me: the relation between an abstract image, a reality cultivated to appear a certain way, and the tortured soul and heart that give rise to it. It is the crux of artistic expression, to go no further.
It is important, to use this as a starting point, to be able to note in jidaigeki how submission is both social evil and spiritual practice. One does not negate the other, and this coexistence continues to power Japanese life and art to this day. Being a courtesan was its own artform, like cinema its own abstraction of the human experience, but we know that; we can take that from even the shoddy Memoirs of a Geisha. Mizoguchi, of course, posits that the abstraction was forced, or cultivated by necessity, and so first and foremostly social evil. This is the part that is readily available to Western audiences, who can draw from our own histories of repression.
We see the fruits of that evil. The woman is finally stranded before the gates of hell, alone playing her sakuhachi. So where are the plum blossoms growing there, in the midst of suffering, as the Zen teachers used to say?
The first layer has the tangy taste of irony; the woman is finally afforded some peace, but only as she submits to the image she has been groomed into. Her first client turns out to be a teacher of dharma, who uses her as a cautionary example of the transient world to his disciples. Again, she concedes to be the cultural image, the instrument, the agent, again a goblin cat that has suffered with beauty to expose ugliness. The second layer is where we are tricked to expect redemption. But it's again a bleak victory, that she can only disappear from her persecutors in the maze of their own gardens.
The final image is the enigma of a small gesture, as the woman, offers a passing nod to a temple in the distance.
It is a powerful work, but a little one-sided for what I expect from the best of films. It is right, of course, to condemn what it does from a bygone time; but since we can plainly see that we continue to suffer in our increasingly more democratic and comfortable lives, that it has not ended with the abolishment of this or that institution, how does the film address that human state that knows no boundaries?
Ugetsu sees both ends with more clarity.
A wide panorama of a cruel, patriarchal Japan emerges: servile men and women, obedient vassals to absent lords, bow their heads to the most icy whims, cold, selfish fathers sell their daughters to pay off a loan, fragile wives cower fearful that they might lose the affections of their disinterested husbands, snotty owners of upscale establishments crawl at the sight of money even if it comes by a peasant's hand, prayer is a mock ritual that comes before or after the most debasing acts. Youth and beauty are minutely groomed to be a pleasant diversion for money and power, and are finally banished from sight when the serve no more use.
It is all meant to work as an expose on the harsh realities behind the cherry-blossomed idylls of medieval Japan, a world so completely controlled that only a cat, a supernatural agent, can expose its ugliness. It is educating to see, no doubt, but this function does not interest me overmuch. The single-minded focus on critique inadvertently irons out some of the complexities of a more elaborate world.
One it preserves, therein lies the film's power for me: the relation between an abstract image, a reality cultivated to appear a certain way, and the tortured soul and heart that give rise to it. It is the crux of artistic expression, to go no further.
It is important, to use this as a starting point, to be able to note in jidaigeki how submission is both social evil and spiritual practice. One does not negate the other, and this coexistence continues to power Japanese life and art to this day. Being a courtesan was its own artform, like cinema its own abstraction of the human experience, but we know that; we can take that from even the shoddy Memoirs of a Geisha. Mizoguchi, of course, posits that the abstraction was forced, or cultivated by necessity, and so first and foremostly social evil. This is the part that is readily available to Western audiences, who can draw from our own histories of repression.
We see the fruits of that evil. The woman is finally stranded before the gates of hell, alone playing her sakuhachi. So where are the plum blossoms growing there, in the midst of suffering, as the Zen teachers used to say?
The first layer has the tangy taste of irony; the woman is finally afforded some peace, but only as she submits to the image she has been groomed into. Her first client turns out to be a teacher of dharma, who uses her as a cautionary example of the transient world to his disciples. Again, she concedes to be the cultural image, the instrument, the agent, again a goblin cat that has suffered with beauty to expose ugliness. The second layer is where we are tricked to expect redemption. But it's again a bleak victory, that she can only disappear from her persecutors in the maze of their own gardens.
The final image is the enigma of a small gesture, as the woman, offers a passing nod to a temple in the distance.
It is a powerful work, but a little one-sided for what I expect from the best of films. It is right, of course, to condemn what it does from a bygone time; but since we can plainly see that we continue to suffer in our increasingly more democratic and comfortable lives, that it has not ended with the abolishment of this or that institution, how does the film address that human state that knows no boundaries?
Ugetsu sees both ends with more clarity.