Life of Oharu / Saikaku ichidai onna (1952)

Life of Oharu brought Kenji Mizoguchi his first international recognition and is regarded by many critics as his very finest movie. But we might wonder how much of its success among European film critics, including a major award at Venice, was determined by its utter “foreignness.” In 1950, Rashomon had seemed rather like a film set on Mars. But even in 1952, Life of Oharu would have seemed to westerners like a film not only set on Mars, but actually made there. The setting of 17th century Japan was one of the least familiar settings in any movies of that era, even in Japan, since the combination of the Occupation and studio poverty had discouraged even non-militaristic jidai-geki. Mizoguchi’s practice of long takes and long shots reach their peak and a high proportion of the scenes actually are shot from behind the star so that we seem to see Kinuyo Tanaka’s back more than her face. Mizoguchi’s use of ambient sound featuring traditional Japanese music removes the most common cue for an audience’s emotional connection to the movie. The result is a movie that, even today, seems more remote than almost any other Japanese film, even the silents.

But no matter how elegant or unusual or identifiable the visual style (and critics were suckers for an easily recognizable style long before the auteur theory appeared), there must be some actual content. Based on a popular 17th century story, it relates the life of a woman who is actually so high born that she becomes a personal attendant on the Empress herself. By the end, she is a wandering beggar. In between is how she got there, with just about every josei-eiga  cliché ever thought of crammed into one feature.

For just the high points: at court she falls in love with a man from a lower order (Toshiro Mifune), only to see him beheaded for their liaison. She is then thrown out of the court and given to a daimyo to be his concubine. There she produces a son. The wife has her sent home to her parents, lest she become too dear to the daimyo, while the child is of course taken away. Just to be sure, her entire family is exiled from the clan, so her parents sell her to a brothel to cover the family’s debts. A kind man offers to buy her out but his money is discovered to be counterfeit. When she is finally able to return home, she is sold again, this time as a maid. The wife there becomes jealous of her beauty and throws her out, though she is completely innocent. She becomes a nun, but she is raped in the temple. Given her past in the brothel, no one will believe her, so she is thrown out of the nunnery and becomes a street prostitute.

Suddenly, nobles appear to tell her that her son has become the daimyo and to bring her back to his court. But there is no happy reunion – as an act of great magnanimity, the son allows Oharu to hide in the bushes and watch him walk to the end of the walkway and turn around. She can cry like Stella Dallas at the window but can not speak to him or even see him again, for she is immediately imprisoned so that no hint of her scandalous past might reach the public ear. Somehow she escapes and becomes the beggar we see at the end.

Any movie in English, French, or Italian that just kept piling on the sob stories like this, no matter how elegantly told, would have produced howls of derision from serious critics of the time. Even now, with all of the aura surrounding Mizoguchi, it is hard to watch all the way through and not burst out into an “Oh, come on!!!” now and then.

Obviously, Mizoguchi’s distancing by long shot and, even more, his use of traditional Japanese music lessens considerably the tear-jerker aspects. Swelling strings in the manner of other josei-eiga of the period or all women’s pictures made elsewhere would have given the game away. In that sense, it is a triumph of style over substance. But the substance is still cliché piled on top of cliché.

Despite its soap-opera story, however, it is particularly “Japanese” in that everything that happens to Oharu is done to her, not by her. Oharu is what we like to call today a “survivor,” but only because she simply refuses to commit suicide. The life of a Moll Flanders, as a comparison, is full of ups and downs, all of which are due to a combination of her choices and pure coincidence. Oharu, after her first love, makes no choices of her own and runs into no coincidences; her life is fully determined by the society in which she lives. Her primary act of agency is to faint.* She is the opposite of Imamura’s Insect Woman, who forever fights her way up a hill like Sisyphus. Oharu essentially is knocked off a high hill only to wait on ever smaller ones for someone to push her off. This is not a character flaw so much as the way the society works for women, at least for women who begin in her position.  It is, in its way, the most Calvinist film I’ve ever seen, the very essence of predestination. Yet there are times when you may find yourself wishing she would fight back, no matter how vain such a fight would have been.

I have not read the original story, but the standard translation of its title is “Life of an Amorous Woman,” retained in part in the original Japanese title for the movie, and the various available plot summaries suggest a story of a woman ruled by sexual urges. (Any enlightenment will be welcomed.) If so, this is not the movie Mizoguchi made. Oharu is a Victim, distilled to its pure essence. She is not a typical movie female victim misled by men, sacrificing for men, or even just missing her chance. Rather, she is a victim of the entire world. Oharu’s victimhood here is unrelenting, which may in fact be a true depiction of the position of women in Japan, or at least of women in her social class. Certainly it is a fundamental of films by most Japanese directors that things never go well for women. But the repetition of Oharu’s misfortunes gradually becomes implausible and, at least to these eyes, boring in its predictability. No amount of elegance in the presentation or the presence of Kinuyo Tanaka can really overcome that.

* There is in fact a cottage industry among academics dealing with her fainting episodes; Google “why does Oharu faint” to see a sample of these.