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Mamoulian's Applause is visible in the bravura apparatus of traveling players, the camera finds the headliner behind curtains in a bustling carnival tent though not before taking note of a couple of leashed wrestling monkeys. "A cascading goddess," the titular performer (Takako Irie) makes water streams dance for captivated audiences. She savors a memory in beaming close-up and a cut teleports her to the back of the carriage where she made the acquaintance of the proud coachman (Tokihiko Okada), an orphaned law student of samurai descent. The budding romance is suspended as she insists on funding his education in Tokyo, tragic irony suffuses their reunion. "Chance and fate. That's all there is." Kenji Mizoguchi's articulation of the visual field in this late silent is already acute, his tender bleakness already overpowering. Negotiating the advances of a lecherous moneybags by knocking him through a shoji, the protagonist "sells her art, not her body." Furtive couples abound in the itinerant troupe caught in winter's dry spell, the knife-thrower (Koju Murata) sees his wife (Kumeko Urabe) run off with one lover and his assistant (Suzuko Taki) run off with another, a high-angled seaside panorama receives the eloping duo. Wronged by the loan shark (Ichiro Sugai), the heroine marches into his abode with dagger in hand and leaves a fugitive. A falling star dissolves to the police inspector's grim mug, a dolly-in past cell bars gives way to the prisoner's dream of domesticity, and who's the driven young prosecutor at her trial? The moonlit bridge and the river flowing on, stage jets that might be a deluge of tears. "Let my death be meaningful." The Downfall of Osen and The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums reiterate, sharpen the predicament. With Bontaro Miake, Koji Oizumi, Jo Ohara, and Nobuo Kosaka. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |