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From Osaka to Kyoto, not an elegy but an outcry. A bravura lateral scan of the fallen mansion finds the belongings being loudly auctioned off, the ruined merchant (Benkei Shiganoya) leaves the family to crash in the pleasure district with his geisha (Yoko Umemura). He waxes poetic ("A single Paulownia leaf falls, a portent of autumn") and counts on her dutiful servility, her sister (Isuzu Yamada) has other plans—younger, Westernized and with no use for docile tradition, she declares war on the opposite sex that sees women merely as playthings. Fully adapted to a society of exploitation, she strings along a smitten kimono-shop clerk (Taizo Fukami) and replaces the bankrupt patron with a successful one (Fumio Okura). "Since men are that way, get all you can from them." A gold-digger comedy, Cukor's Girls About Town, say, made into a scalding call to arms by Kenji Mizoguchi at his most outraged. Love and survival form the two-sided coin, too passive or too ruthless, "still have to hustle." (Their sugar-daddies meanwhile are bespectacled lookalikes of dull-witted entitlement.) Lines within boxed-in compositions and camera movement that accentuates restriction, the voyeuristic "goldfish bowl" that is the characters' cosmos and the cinematic screen. The clerk's boss (Eitaro Shindo) lambastes him for being so easily manipulated ("Don't be the kind of sap who has to buy a woman's love") before visiting Yamada, moments later he's wrapped around her finger. Gaming the system is a perilous maneuver, the hard-boiled dame finds out in the back of a moving cab, the ditched beau has his revenge. "Why must we suffer so?" Battered and abandoned and still raging, the rebellious spirit down but not out. Chaplin in The Great Dictator expands the coda. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |