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Kenji Mizoguchi and art under the occupation, "not the temptation of the absolute but the call of the void" (Godard on Montparnasse 19). The contrast is direct, the katana and the brush, Utamaro (Minosuke Bando) is challenged and calmly turns a sword duel into a painting contest. ("Lovely, but she's not alive" is his verdict on the hotheaded samurai's sketch, he improves it with two or three lines and leaves the opponent stupefied like Salieri.) Positioning himself against prestigious tradition, the 18th-century engraver seeks "prints of flesh and blood" and ponders a harem of muses. The aged courtesan (Kiniko Shiratao) still longing for her portrait, the beauty (Toshiko Iizuka) whose sublime skin overpowers the best tattoo artist, the volatile model (Kinuyo Tanaka) with no use for half-hearted emotions. The callow apprentice (Kotaro bando) abandons his fiancée (Eiko Ohara) and joins the pursuit, though the bohemian life is not without its droughts: A great long take finds the uninspired Utamaro surrounded by crumpled scrolls, a maid draws the curtains and brings a candle, and the tones of Mizoguchi's mise en scène are adjusted in tandem with those of the artisan's easel. The aesthete as firebrand literally manacled by censors, as voyeur drawing furiously while a lecherous lord's concubines dive into the lake. (In a Busby Berkeley maneuver, each kimono drops before the camera's rapidly panning eye.) "I sense a masterpiece... If I could only get a closer look!" Picasso's Le Chef d'oeuvre inconnu is a key image, trenchantly enhanced when the protagonist uses a girl's bare back as a canvas—a conscious ode to all the heroines who have carried the famed male gaze on their shoulders. Minnelli (Lust for Life) and Russell (Savage Messiah) and Rivette (La Belle Noiseuse) follow, Mizoguchi's own companion piece is Princess Yang Kwei-Fei. With Hiroko Kawasaki, Shotaro Nakamura, and Minpei Tomimoto. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |