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The camera cranes down from cloudy skies to a placid wharf suddenly festooned with banners, and there you have the Meiji era's changing winds. After getting a taste of activism, the heroine (Kinuyo Tanaka) leaves for Tokyo to fight for equality with the Liberal Party (or, as her father calls it, "the Thieves Party"). She distributes Joan of Arc pamphlets and attends demonstrations, her beau (Eitaro Ozawa) and the party leader (Ichiro Sugai) both betray her (the former is a government spy, the latter a hypocritical libertine). Parallel to this is the trajectory of the servant (Mitsuko Mito) who, sold to pay off her parents' debt and thrown in prison for torching the mill where she was enslaved, ends up a concubine for Tanaka's husband. Kenji Mizoguchi, ferocious and delicate, on the limits of enlightenment—rallies and debates aren't enough when liberation isn't equal, women have their own personal revolutions to lead. The high-angle tracking shot of rebels coursing through the village was not forgotten by Visconti (Il Gattopardo), though it's in its moments of extraordinarily charged stillness that the vision of feminist revolt crystallizes. Two long, unbroken takes would have Wyler taking notes: The first, kept at tatami-level, is a boarding-house confession and scuffle that climaxes with knocked-over veils blotting out half the screen; the second, bracketed by doors creaking open and slamming shut, ponders a couple nearly reuniting in a jail visiting-room, each shift in the relationship mapped out as domestic bromides ("A woman can only become a woman with the love of a man") are brought up and turned down. Spiritual and literal flames for Mizoguchi, a severe view of the private upheavals that shape history more than treaties and parades. With Shinobu Araki, Kuniko Miyake, Koreya Senda, and Eijiro Tono. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |