Memorable, crazy movie

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

Blistering performances.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Ayako (Isuzu Yamada) becomes the mistress of her boss, Mr. Asai, so she can pay her father's debt, and prevent him from going to prison for embezzlement. She also sends money to her brother Hiroshi to pay his university tuition, but her father intercepts it.Mizoguchi considered the film his first serious effort as a director, and while I am not familiar with his earlier work, I have to say this is the kind of film that leaves a mark. Either Mizoguchi or his cinematographer had an excellent awareness of the camera -- the door closing to block the camera early on in the film -- years ahead of its time.The subject matter in general is impressive. I am not sure what the typical morality was in pre-war Japan, but to feature adultery and whatnot in the 1930s seems quite bold.

I believe the challenge here was to conceive of a film in terms of bunraku - the traditional Japanese puppet theater - and extrapolate from the environment a structure, so one stage where heightened drama unfolds, controlled, with a view of the mechanisms handling the illusion, and then a second stage on the side to supply a rotation of music and voice expressing emotion. This is very well thought out, something to keep in mind when viewing later Mizoguchi where melodrama lacks annotation.This translates in our film as melodrama about a bold young woman who gambles away on her dignity and reputation because the world around her is desperate for either money or sex, the controlling mechanism is that only the viewer is in possession of all the facts and so is able to read tragic fate in every exchange. This has been noted by some viewers as film noir, because the woman appears to function as a femme fatale, but the Japanese have no affinity for this sort of trope.So of course, in accordance with bunraku, the woman is a puppeteer but also herself a puppet, a figure on the same stage as the play she enacts, her movements subject to our scrutiny. You will note this in tandem with, and reversing, an earlier Mizoguchi - The Water Magician - about a water artist whose life is merged with the transitory flows she used to control.This is beautifully rendered in a scene where she is caught with her boss on a night out to watch a bunraku play. She has set a plot in motion, attempting control, an active role, but unpredictable life foils her. The wife demands explanations but seems the most irate for noticing the hairstyle on the girl, signifying a married woman, her role on the stage being supplanted even though it's a loveless marriage and thankless role. Moments before, however, we have seen an excerpt from the play, where inside the artifice, the controlled fiction, it was the suspicious husband accusing the woman of adultery.This would have an ordinary ironic effect if mapped cleanly to the situation outside the stage, but it doesn't, it's wholly asymmetrical, the tension all in the imbalance of familiar elements framed askew. You have to puzzle about assigning to the players the puppet-master's controls. This is the touch lacking in Ozu's Floating Weeds.The music is not in the emotional after-effects of storytelling, this too part of the heightened artifice. The music is in the camera, caressing day from night.

One of the early films of Kenzi Mizoguchi, apparently the one that got him his first wide acclaim and box-office success, was a melodrama that went right for the familial gut. I think the emotional purpose, of pointing a finger right at the audience and asking "what would you do?" works because of the society that Mizoguchi was in at the time. It may be hard for some to conceive that forgiveness of something like being the "other" woman for a married man and getting arrested for a petty crime would be impossible, but in Osaka Elegy this is exactly what occurs. We feel strongly this sense of Ayako Murai wanting to do the right thing, of being a good daughter for her father who has money problems (accused of embezzlement for one thing and needing the $300), but that there's also the problem of this affair.Most of this is seen in long-takes by Mizoguchi, some well filmed and some not so much (it was 1936 and I imagine not the best equipment for, say, outdoor night shoots with little light), and we feel this cold detachment that the other characters start to feel for her, sometimes on a dime, and it leads to a point where she is just walking the streets, with nobody, a "stray" with no job and no family. I know I'm spoiling but it's important to point out the context - this is a drama that is so embedded in the melodrama of this story, of these characters struggling and being stubborn all the way, be it Ayako's father or even her ex-boss. If nothing else Mizoguchi makes a very strong identification with this character, and other characters like her family, and the nice young man who wants to just marry her... and deep down vise-versa.It's not the smoothest film (some of the cinematography is gorgeous but, again, it also jitters a bit and the print is worse for wear even in the Eclipse series), and a couple of the supporting performances like the cuckold wife is one-dimensional. Yet it's lead by an amazingly tender and tough and touching actress Isuzu Yamada, and a few scenes like the strange puppet theater scene or a specifically harsh scene where the nice young man discovers Ayako's true self and is in a stunned silence in the corner of the room are classics unto themselves. Certainly for any fan of the director's, even if it's not a complete masterpiece; maybe a look at the 90 minute cut, as opposed to the 71 minute one, will revise this review. 8.5/10

"Osaka Elegy" (Japanese, 1936): Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. This is one of his earliest films. Japan was in the throes of a cultural turmoil. They were busy invading China, and feeling the schizophrenia of traditional vs modern society. This story is about a decent young woman, who, when familial pressure is applied, does anything necessary to pay the bills of a pathetic father, a self-centered brother, and a confused, naïve sister, and, a keep an abusive boss "happy". As we might expect (now), her road darkens as everyone demands more and more, gives back less and less, and shuns her for doing what they suggested and made their advantage. Expect a noir-ish look to the film, with spare traditional home sets and costuming, contrasted with high style business/commercial sets and costuming.