Reviews & Ratings for
The Crucified Lovers More at IMDbPro »Chikamatsu monogatari (original title)

6 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
An accessible masterpiece, 30 November 2002

Author: David (davidals@msn.com) from Chapel Hill, NC, USA

The only print of CHIKAMATUS MONOGATARI I've been able to find was abysmal - I almost couldn't watch it. Which is a shame as this is among the greatest Mizoguchi films. The story - which I believe had been done before and since by other Japanese directors - is a bit straighter than my favorite Mizoguchi films (SANSHO THE BAILIFF and UGETSU MONOGATARI), and is essentially a tale of tragic romance, in this case a transgressive romance that crosses strict class boundaries. As always with Mizoguchi, there is an exquisitely expressed tone of defiance, and - bad print aside - I was very pleased. As with all of Mizoguchi's films, I'm eagerly awaiting a restored DVD release - whenever that may come...

10 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
The best love story on film, 2 July 2001
Author: matrac (matrac@cam.org) from Montreal

I saw this over 20 years ago and I remember it well. Superb photography. Great acting by the 2 leads. How things were different in that era compared to today in Japan. This is probably very hard to find on video if it exists at all. But you may see it in art houses like I did. Another Mizoguchi classic. If you like his work, I recommend The Human Condition, the greatest film ever made.

2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Crucified Lovers, 24 April 2010

Author: GyatsoLa from Ireland

This film was near the end of a wonderful sequence of films made near the end of his life by Mizoguchi. As Tony Raines says in the DVD extra for the Masters of Cinema edition this was a studio project that he was not wholly enthusiastic about. This shows a little in the film as it lacks some of the real flair and emotional power of some of his earlier great films. However, it shares with them his wonderful flowing camera and great cinematography. Its also a terrific story, based originally on a story from the great Japanese 17th Century playwright Monzaemon Chikamatsu (hence the Japanese name, A Tale from Chikamatsu). The screenplay is skillfully worked from the original story, which depends a lot of some pretty unlikely coincidences.

The film has a great cast, although the lead actor (and major star at the time) Kazuo Hazegawa is a little old for the role of the shy lover. Kyoko Kagawa is great as the wife of a powerful merchant who is mistakenly accused of having an affair with her servant, but then falls in love with him as they both go on the run.

As you'd expect from a Mizoguchi film, technically it is flawless, with lovely sets and some beautiful camera work. The Masters of Cinema version on DVD is a beautiful restoration. For Mizoguchi fans, this film is well worth getting, but for those who haven't seen many of his films it would be better to start with some of his earlier masterpieces.

The tortured heart behind the cultivated image, 13 November 2011

Author: chaos-rampant from Greece

This is adapted from a work by Chikamatsu Monzaemon, one of the defining writers from the early Tokugawa era. His name often reaches us in the contours of a Japanese Shakespeare and as usually with these Western imports to explain Eastern art, it is mostly a lazy comparison. Unlike Shakespeare who continues to inspire a steady flow of film, Chikamatsu's name has been largely neglected however; there is this, and films by Uchida, Shinoda, and Yasuzo Masumura, 'shunji'/double-suicide stories that were Chikamatsu's forte, each enlivened in its own way by the intensity of vibrant artifice and a story of forbidden passions cleansed by death.

So film-wise, the heart of these things has been extrapolated from where centuries of concentrated practice refined them, in the stages of kabuki or bunraku, both of which featured elaborate contraptions for generating illusions. The stage having been set, it was all a matter of achieving a cinematic mobility around it. Shinoda made the most clever simple use of that stage in Double Suicide; he was essentially filming what domestic audiences had enjoyed for centuries on the stage of bunraku as part of unbroken tradition, but trusting our eye to be naturally dislocated the right distance to absorb this as a puzzling modernity.

It is not unlike what has happened with Mizoguchi; a visual purity from tradition dislocated, thus obscured, through Western interpretations.

But let's backtrack a little. We know that Chikamatsu abandoned kabuki for the puppet theater of bunraku, an author's theater, with pliable actors held on strings and the gods that move the world made visible. There he worked in favour of better integrated audience manipulation, in favour of an idealized realism sprung from the author's mind.

So here we have a film about a scroll-maker, himself an artist charged with cultivating idealized images, fighting against the idealized reality he has helped cultivate in a quest for the true love he had all his life sublimated into perfect service.

It is very similar to Oharu in this way; the film structured around the tension that rises from characters performing idealized roles and the tortured heart that gives rise to them. There is a master printer who cultivates the image of the noble benefactor but who is a cruel deceiving scumbag. Nobles who act magnanimous in the open but then use their position to barter for money. The rival printer who feigns congratulations or compassion but who is secretly plotting for the imperial position.

So this idealized world that Chikamatsu advocated and in a small part helped cultivate, Mizoguchi posits to be a system of organized oppression with victims its own characters.

But it is in thrusting through this world of idealized, thus largely fictional appearances, that the two lovers can finally realize feelings that were socially prohibited. In this fictional world true beauty, a love fou, is realized by shedding the artificial. As it turns out, the two of them become the couple they were groomed to be.

As usual with Mizoguchi, the narrative on the surface level is never less than obvious. It is clean, disarmingly earnest. It seems like the film does not demand anything of us. But beneath the controlled histrionics, there is a heart of images that beats with abstract beauty.

The final image is of the two lovers publicly declaring love by simply standing together. It is again clean but resonates outsid the narrative. Their fate is sealed, but the image no longer cultivated but naturally arisen now has the chance to blossom across the audience of curious onlookers. It is an image with the power to inspire change.

Mizoguchi is not a filmmaker I can deem personal. But he's a remarkable study just the same.

3 out of 7 people found the following review useful:
Elegant and methodical, 21 March 2006
Author: (futures@exis.net) from Ronn Ives/FUTURES Antiques, Norfolk, VA.

"Chikamatsu Monogatari" (Crucified Lovers) (Japanese, 1954): Set in 17th century Japan, a series of honorable gestures begins to go terribly wrong, and takes victims with them. Did you know that adulterers at that time were crucified in Japan? This and many more traditions of the Old Way were up for reexamination by the Japanese culture soon after their defeat in World War II. This must have been a time of great doubt for them – after all, wasn't it their past that lead them to their current condition? "Chikamatsu Monogatari" is an elegant, methodical story with tragic twists and turns that never the less head straight into inflexible Fate.

5 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
Good though not on par with Mizoguchi's masterpieces, 10 February 2006

Author: ottffsse_sequence from United States

This is certainly a good film, beautifully photographed and evocatively acted. Yet one should certainly criticize it, and Mizoguchi, for it is not without flaws and weaknesses. Mizoguchi really cared for women, and wanted to make statements on man's lack of sympathy and total cruelty, yet he sometimes gets ahead of himself in trying to make this statement by adopting the wrong means. This is certainly a case in 'the Crucified Lovers', 'Princess Yang Kwei Fei' and 'Zankiku monogatari'. He sets the scenario in feudal Japan, which leaves the viewer at the end with the partially right exclamation: "boy, does feudalism suck, I'm glad that it is over...". And true, some of the scenarios such weaker films of Mizoguchi present would be literary impossible today. Also, his women characters sometimes become archetypes of unrealistic self-sacrifice, which also simplifies the scenario less appealing. Saying that, "Crucified Lovers" is a good film, with such few relative weaknesses, though the sometimes chilly, cynical prose by Ueda, the screenwriter helps this film allot. I still highly prefer and recommend Mizoguchi's 'realistic, 'contemprary' films of 1936: 'Osaka Elegy' and 'Sisters of the Gion', as well as his late masterpieces, in which he showed more restraint and subtlety: 'Ugetsu', 'Sansho Dayu', and 'The Life of Oharu'.

8 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
Beautiful, but inferior to Mizoguchi's Masterpieces, 9 August 2003
Author: Kalaman from Ottawa

I never heard of Mizoguchi's "Chikamatsu monogatari" before until a friend of mine who loves Mizoguchi's films showed it to me recently. It is a beautiful, haunting, and emotionally involving study of forbidden love between a rigid merchant's wife, Osan, and her devoted servant, Mohei, in 17th century Kyoto. The lovers are unfairly punished for having an affair; Osan escapes her husband's home while Mohei is forced into exile. "Chikamatsu" is a highly charged work, but I'm not entirely sure if I would call it a masterpiece on par with "Zangiku monogatari", "The Life of Oharu", "Ugetsu", "Sansho dayu", and "Princess Yang Kwei Fei" - Mizoguchi's richest and most beautiful films. The photography is extraordinarily ravishing and evocative, with Mizoguchi's masterful fluid camera. Also, the sound quality of "Chikamatsu" is interestingly rich and astounding, but the film doesn't stay with you for a while like those aforementioned films. Overall, this is a minor Mizoguchi: beautiful and haunting at times, but inferior to his renowned masterpieces.

8 out of 27 people found the following review useful:
Balanced Beam, 26 May 2007
Author: tedg (tedg@FilmsFolded.com) from Virginia Beach

Some time ago, I had the opportunity to attend an Ichibana lecture and demonstration. It was given by those close to emperor and was tailored for westerners. That meant that there were plenty slides that contrasted western flower arranging with this highest Japanese art. The western values all had to do with perfect symmetry, balance, coherent, simple shapes. Each element should be beautiful by itself. Harmonies were all within this lovely melody of perfect pace. Bach.

Contrasted with this was the Ichibana we saw constructed before us. Dissymmetries, tension, motion and peace. Some elements were dead, even damaged. The base or container was as likely to be misshapen, even ugly. Where the western arrangements were music, this was life. It had soul, katachi. The whole thing was quite an experience for me and was my most visceral introduction to a corner of Japan that I have since enfolded into my own life and eye. At the root of this is dissymmetry (which is different from asymmetry), the presence of items that have sibling states which are not expressed. It gives a tension that springs, the pumps blood and makes real beauty because it provides space for the definition of beauty.

This is one of the reasons I appreciate Kurosawa. He understood this, and is why I eagerly watch recommended Japanese films. And why I came to this. Surely Mizoguchi is one of the most celebrated Japanese filmmakers. But what I'm experiencing with him lacks that katachi, that clean, beauty of tension I wished for. What I see is comparatively western. Oh, the story is traditionally Japanese, and the manner of the story. But everything cinematic is perfectly constructed, balanced. Every frame is a masterpiece of construction, and in three dimensions. Its geometric, its rich, its balanced, every vision. Every bit is lovely, every motion perfect, every jot complemented.

Its not Ichibana. Its too pretty to be beautiful. Its too Methodist.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

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