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Gleaming neon sign and smoky industrial wharf, Osaka at dusk and dawn. The pharmaceutical magnate (Benkei Shiganoya) pads around the mansion atrium (deep-focus diagonals from an elevated angle), snaps at servants, prays for wealth and health. The missus (Yoko Umemura) has a headache, at the breakfast table there's a remembrance of happier conjugal times. "Should we go back to calling each other darling?" "Don't be absurd. With a face like yours?" A mistress is the solution, the young switchboard operator (Isuzu Yamada) will do, her embezzling father and university-bound brother need funds. She's kept at a luxurious apartment but dreams of marriage to her boyfriend (Kensaku Hara), with slanted hat and hand in hip she might be a Stanwyck toughie in a Wellman tale. "Who knows how much further I'll fall?" The mobile medium shot is Kenji Mizoguchi's analytical tool of choice, long takes and framing in depth crystallize tension for each scene. (The elaborate arrangements of foreground and background make for a veritable bedrock for Hou Hsiao-hsien.) Renoir's thêâtre des fantoches (La Chienne) is a bunraku performance, in which the trembling romanticism of the puppets ("The malady dwelling deep in my heart...") is a world away from the money-based affair of the couple watching it. Grilled at the police station, the squirming beau denounces the "bad woman" and the camera pans to the next room to locate Yamada's lingering look of betrayal—Mizoguchi watches it all like the stern, tender officer who "hates the crime but not the individual." Released only to be bathed in scorn by the relatives she's been supporting, the heroine departs defiantly from dwarfing compositions toward a rare close-up, away from a screen that can no longer hold her. With Seiichi Takegawa, Chiyoko Okura, Eitaro Shindo, Kunio Tamura, and Takashi Shimura. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |