Flame of My Love

It's Japan in the 1880s. The Liberal Party is not what we think of as liberals today, but a group of lower-class radicals who want to replace the government by the powerful clans with a democratically elected body. Their leader is Ichirô Sugai and the government has forbidden meetings. That doesn't stop him. Neither does it stop Kinuyo Tanaka, a schoolteacher who heads off to Tokyo to work for Sugai, not anticipating prison, a marriage to Sugai and betrayal of her ideals. She believe that until women are equal with men, no one can be free.

Although Miss Tanaka endures hardships, it is Mitsuko Mito who suffers degradation. It is she who is sold by her parents to provide for her old age. It is she who is raped and beaten. It is she who seeks to be the servant of a man, any man, who promises to take care of her.

It's a feminist movie directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, as raw a political tract as any he directed. He would show degradation of the individual with Miss Tanaka in works life LIFE OF OHARU. In that one, it is an individual degradation that stands in for every woman. In this one, he shows how the political system of Japan works to degrade women, and how they must struggle to make a new Japan. the artful beauty of his films does not exist here. Instead, there is the pandemonium of the factories and women's prisons, where the men in charge beat and rape their charges, and the smug satisfaction of the newly enfranchised men, who feel that now that they have power, everything is fine... and nothing changes.