|
The title invokes John Singer Sargent, and Kenji Mizoguchi's socialite is just as detailed and mysterious. The troubled beauty is an affluent heiress (Michiyo Kogure) first seen at her father's wake, tending to the drunk husband (Eijiro Yanagi) flaunting striped boxers under white robes. Not just vulgar but proudly hoggish, he squanders their fortune until the family home must be converted into a saké inn run by his greedy mistress (Yuriko Hamada). (A half-lit, high-angled shot—spent revelers sprawled on a littered tatami—summarizes the debauchery.) "There are limits to submission," the heroine tries to flee with an earnest teacher (Ken Uehara) but remains helplessly drawn to the brute's carnal force. "Against my feelings, my body accepts him," she confesses. "A demon lives inside it." The new housemaid (Yoshiko Kuga) plays witness, beckoned into the bedroom by Yanagi and ordered to fold his kimono while the couple is still going at it just out of the frame. (More piercing Mizoguchian allusiveness: As the husband's gross silhouette looms over the servant and the humiliated wife squirms beneath the sheets, the camera cuts to butterflies circling a stone lamp outside and to Buddha's beaming visage on a discarded brooch.) Not the literal flames of revolt (My Love Has Been Burning) for Madame Yuki, but the lavish bathtubs of aloof, undulating acquiescence. The aristocratic pavilion's maze of manicured gardens, winding trails and doors opening unto doors is registered by Sirk's own domestic mausoleum in All I Desire. The stunning dénouement points to Ugetsu's spectral realms: The dazed protagonist ambles into the wilderness and stops at a café, the camera cranes down to follow the waiter as he gets tea and then up again to find her chair now empty. Mist creeps in, and it's as if Murnau had never died. With Hayura Kato, Kumeko Urabe, Shizue Natsukawa, and So Yamamura. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |