MLB9

Probably the most unjustly overlooked film of Kenji Mizoguchi, it's the greatest exhibit for the defense against charges of disappointment in his forties career. He made several decent films in the decade, from The 47 Ronin through Five Women Around Utamaro, but there can be no doubt as to what is his greatest forties film, a very definite bridge from his earlier pre-war classics to the string of fifties masterpieces before his premature death.
In Okayama in 1880, young Eiko Hirayama expresses her discontent at her friend Chiyo's having to sell herself to the highest bidder to help her impoverished parents, and her political views lead to the closing down of her school. Dispirited with her family and home town, she moves to Tokyo where she tries to get involved with the liberal movement. However, she soon realises that not only will her politics not be tolerated -- she ends up spending time in prison for them -- but that the so-called liberals are hypocrites seeking freedom only for men and not for women.
It starred the ubiquitous Kinuyo Tanaka -- in her ninth of an amazing fourteen films with the master -- and was co-scripted by Yoshikata Yoda. Familiar collaborators both, but it has a different feel to many of his more famous films. For starters, it's a more brutal film, with very real violence in certain sequences that token a realism rare in Mizoguchi's oeuvre; indeed, the sequences of Chiyo and Eiko suffering in prison from both beatings and attempted rape are amongst the most shocking of Mizoguchi's entire career. While aspects of this realism could be attributed to the script contribution of a young Kaneto Shindo, to counter this it must also be borne in mind that author Kogo Noda was rather associated with the work of Yasujiro Ozu, who made thirteen films from his works. The treatment of women was always a central theme for Mizoguchi, especially in his films with Tanaka, but here the ideology stretches to the slogans of not only the liberals but Tanaka's heroine. When she observes "as long as men won't consider women like human beings and will keep treating them like domestic tools, there won't be any freedom of rights for the people..." she may just as well be providing a court summation for Mizoguchi's illustrious career. Yet in addition he also plays with the very notion of violence itself -- whether 'might for right' really does, as Machiavelli believed, justify the means -- and of filial devotion. It might be seen as the obverse of Ozu's Tokyo Story (also taken from a Noda novel), which accused the youth of Japan of neglecting their parents, in that it accuses parents of encouraging their children to degrade and sell themselves to help them out, a theme that carried forward from his earlier masterwork Sisters of the Gion.
Visually, the film could only have been made by Mizoguchi, a feeling established in the opening wistful shot of villagers looking wistfully out to sea and of the various slow tracking shots along the dockside. Beautifully shot and with Mizoguchi's typically careful framing devices, it's a film whose look proves somewhat hard to dislodge. He's also helped by two excellent performances; from Mito as the heroine's abused friend Chiyo, whose plight represents Eiko's fight in a nutshell, and of course from the truly imperishable Tanaka. Her obduracy and capacity for suffering rarely better expressed than in her steadfastly sticking to her principles against considerable odds, personifying the strength of character at the heart of Japanese womanhood so revered by Mizoguchi. Tony Rayns was right when he said that it's "a film that deserves the same kind of praise as Ugetsu Monogatari and Sansho Dayu." It demands to be seen.
-Allan Fish