Mizoguchi is a tricky filmmaker for me to parse, every film being a kind of wrestle. There is remarkable visual poetry at heart and complicated karmic resonance but I find that he consistently underestimated his audience in the stage of dramatizing. At least here we can chalk it up to the times it was made; the benshi (narrator) articulates every gesture of some importance, every impulse and ironic double-bind. Don't let that phase you, there are riches inside.
So the story here is about a woman, an artist possessed of remarkable talent to make waters dance, who will have to shed creative self in order to help advance love. She is a typical Mizoguchi heroine: stoic, giving, desperate, kind, broken by a cruel order of things. Parsing this, we get deeper undercurrents that pull out the fates.
Visually, the thing will have a lot of appeal to Western eyes. The top layer is culled from French silent filmmakers - Epstein, L'Herbier, Gance, etc. - channeled via Kinugasa's Jujiro, another film about crossroads: so camera mobility, angles, rapid-cuts, pans, layers, modernity, the whole visual fog transmuting dancing waters. Let that settle, then consider a more Japanese heart, visual at the center.
The key scene that sets karmas in motion is where she unexpectedly steals into her lover sleeping on a bridge. Now woodblock prints of the majestic bridges of old Edo feature prominently in Japanese iconography, usually the great Nihonbashi or Ryoguku bridges, as visual archetype of a life in motion, lived across crossroads, pathways, intersections, and echoing the Buddhist transient life.
In addition to the bridge element, this particular image of star-crossed love cloaked in evening secrecy I believe references a print like 'Night View of Matsuchiyama and the San'ya Canal' depicting a geisha skulking off somewhere into the night with a shrine faintly discernible in the background. Mizoguchi was going to build Life of Oharu around this, the image of an enigmatic woman cloaked in the darkness of a social role she must perform, glimmers of redemption in the distance. Our protagonist is not a geisha, but the breaking moment that unleashes bad karma is where she agrees to perform like one.
Between these two images, one where she choreographs fluid form on stage and this one of a chance encounter at karmic crossroads with waters passing under the bridge, unfolds twin fate.
One is invisible to us, until the end, and even then a little questionable. Did the young student really become a prosecutor so fast? No, I believe everything from around the half-way point on, charting the rape, subsequent guilt-ridden persecution, capture, trial, recrimination, and final redemption, is an internal vision, a feverish dream vindicating pain and sacrifice before imaginary law.
This fate we intimately follow, hers. She lives deeper, hurts more, by condoning to be emotionally a part of the dance she formerly controlled. She becomes the water, conflating performance with inner heart.
The film ends with a double-suicide, a most fateful gesture. This is important to note about fate, and is primarily stressed in the film. Fate as only what we choose to structure our lives around. Hers becomes the melodrama she lives and experiences as love.
The rest is transient life written in waters.
So the story here is about a woman, an artist possessed of remarkable talent to make waters dance, who will have to shed creative self in order to help advance love. She is a typical Mizoguchi heroine: stoic, giving, desperate, kind, broken by a cruel order of things. Parsing this, we get deeper undercurrents that pull out the fates.
Visually, the thing will have a lot of appeal to Western eyes. The top layer is culled from French silent filmmakers - Epstein, L'Herbier, Gance, etc. - channeled via Kinugasa's Jujiro, another film about crossroads: so camera mobility, angles, rapid-cuts, pans, layers, modernity, the whole visual fog transmuting dancing waters. Let that settle, then consider a more Japanese heart, visual at the center.
The key scene that sets karmas in motion is where she unexpectedly steals into her lover sleeping on a bridge. Now woodblock prints of the majestic bridges of old Edo feature prominently in Japanese iconography, usually the great Nihonbashi or Ryoguku bridges, as visual archetype of a life in motion, lived across crossroads, pathways, intersections, and echoing the Buddhist transient life.
In addition to the bridge element, this particular image of star-crossed love cloaked in evening secrecy I believe references a print like 'Night View of Matsuchiyama and the San'ya Canal' depicting a geisha skulking off somewhere into the night with a shrine faintly discernible in the background. Mizoguchi was going to build Life of Oharu around this, the image of an enigmatic woman cloaked in the darkness of a social role she must perform, glimmers of redemption in the distance. Our protagonist is not a geisha, but the breaking moment that unleashes bad karma is where she agrees to perform like one.
Between these two images, one where she choreographs fluid form on stage and this one of a chance encounter at karmic crossroads with waters passing under the bridge, unfolds twin fate.
One is invisible to us, until the end, and even then a little questionable. Did the young student really become a prosecutor so fast? No, I believe everything from around the half-way point on, charting the rape, subsequent guilt-ridden persecution, capture, trial, recrimination, and final redemption, is an internal vision, a feverish dream vindicating pain and sacrifice before imaginary law.
This fate we intimately follow, hers. She lives deeper, hurts more, by condoning to be emotionally a part of the dance she formerly controlled. She becomes the water, conflating performance with inner heart.
- and what an amazing performance at the start, I want to know more about this if any reader has information -
The film ends with a double-suicide, a most fateful gesture. This is important to note about fate, and is primarily stressed in the film. Fate as only what we choose to structure our lives around. Hers becomes the melodrama she lives and experiences as love.
The rest is transient life written in waters.