User Reviews

This is yet another fine work from Mizoguchi which I’d read about but had never gotten the opportunity to watch until now; distressingly, I had trouble with the disc once again (severe pixellation towards the very end) and, as was the case with THE LIFE OF OHARU (1952), I was forced to copy the film anew – luckily, with similar success (I’m keeping my fingers crossed for the remaining four Japanese titles I’ve got lined up for the rest of the week!).

To begin with, the title is accurate in that the protagonist, a Japanese painter of the 17th century, isn’t himself involved with the various female figures who inspire his work. Rather, it’s his friends/colleagues and, in particular, two of them who are torn between a couple of women each – in one case, even ending in tragedy! With this in mind, the film is generally lighter than most of the director’s work that I’ve watched so far – but that denouement is all the more effective because it’s unexpected (though followed by an uplifting coda in which the painter resumes his work after serving a 50-day sentence of house arrest for daring to sketch the current Shogun!).

Unlike, say, Akira Kurosawa, few actors used by Mizoguchi are recognizable names to Western audiences – however, the acting in his films is certainly no less compelling: that said, given Mizoguchi’s resume', it’s not surprising that he’s seemingly less interested in the painter himself than in his subjects (and especially Kinuyo Tanaka, the director’s frequent muse, who turns in a beautifully nuanced performance as the volatile geisha driven by love to extremes). This may be a film about an obsessive artist – whom Mizoguchi is said to have imbued with characteristics inherent in himself – and, yet, its intention isn’t to probe into his character or motivations but rather illustrate the time and milieu in which he operated…or, perhaps, to showcase Utamaro’s own “pretentious” dictum that the etchings he made (apparently with little effort!) were more “alive” than those of any of his contemporaries.

As would OHARU, the film follows an episodic structure: we begin by his being challenged to a swordfight over the above comment by an exponent of a rival art school, but countering his impulsive outrage by settling over a duel with the brush (which leaves the latter not merely an admirer of Utamaro’s individualistic style but a willing student and constant companion!). Other major sequences include the one where Utamaro paints directly on the ‘perfect skin’ of a courtesan (which had previously overwhelmed an eminent tattooist!) and the one which sees the painter (who has been turning below-par work due to a lack of inspiration) being presented with the opportunity of clandestinely sketching a plethora of concubines who regularly assemble at the river and, watched over by their lord, dive en masse to catch fish! Reportedly, Mizoguchi had trouble making this film at a time when period pieces were forbidden by the Occupation forces in Japan because of their glorification of feudal values; besides, the film’s budget apparently wasn’t big enough to afford a crane (which would have enabled the director’s traditional long and sweeping tracking shots) – however, he more than compensated with a flawlessly exquisite sense of composition throughout.

An fiction based on the life of the Japanese print artist Kitagawa Utamaro (1753-1806) and some of the people around him. Mainly for those interested in either director Kenji Mizoguchi or in the life in the Yoshiwara (the expensive licensed brothel district) and other areas the sporting life of the time.

Very good acting, wonderful female costumes and well done sets. The print I saw at the Museum of Modern Art seemed vaguely out of focus (perhaps it is a 16 mm print).

Quick note about this print: it was run at the Brooklyn Museum last night and it was a pristine print -- that is to say, it was only two years old with the incept date being 2006 and physically in very good shape with no splices except for the single lab spices at 1000ft in each reel and the head and tails leaders were spliced indicating it has been mounted on a platter transport system. But, all the imperfections that are visible, the very soft focus as was noted in the previous post and an annoying jitter that is apparent in certain shots, are generated from whatever elements this print was struck, not from this physical print itself, which, as I said was in excellent condition.

Actually the soft focus even had a look that indicates it might have been struck from a video master.....it had that video "look," although 16mm is still a contender.

It is possibly that the DVD release is responsible for the new print. They may have gone back to the original negative or internegative elements for the DVD, dumped them to video, edited them and produced a video master. It would have been cost-effective to simply make a transfer from the video master rather than go the film route.

Something that also points in that direction is the fact that the subtitles were not etched. Normally subtitles are physically etched into each frame either by a laser or chemically, removing the picture emulsion. This process produces subtitles that are very easy to read, even in very bright scenes. This method produces text that is always lighter than the background; even if the background is white, the text will be whiter. The subtitles in this print were not etched hence they were very difficult to read when against white backgrounds. The subtitles were rock steady, even when the background was jittering which is another indication they were produced in the video stage and then the print struck from that video master.

Although these clues point to a print derived from a video master, a blowup from a 16mm release print is also a possibility.

It would be interesting to see if the DVD has these same soft focus and jitter artifacts as well.

The film is interesting, but not nearly as provocative as it must have been in the 40s. I was struck by the liberal use of very long and complex tracking shots, not very common in at that time and quite daring.

This is the best of the fourteen films I've seen by Mizoguchi, who is probably most famous for three films he made in the early '50s: "The Life of Oharu", "Ugetsu", and "Sansho the Bailiff". These are very good films, for certain, but I've found that my favorite Mizoguchi films tend to be earlier in his career, during a period that began with the advent of sound cinema (1936 or so, in Japan), and ended in the late '40s. "Osaka Elegy", "Sisters of the Gion", "Story of the Last Chrystanthemums", "The 47 Ronin: Part I", "The 47 Ronin: Part II", "Otamaro and His Five Women", and "Women of the Night" — these films lack the exquisite elements of mood and atmosphere that made Mizoguchi's early '50s films so great, but otherwise I think they are superior. They are very simply but poignantly toned, and they possess a poetry that I believe is unique to this period in Mizoguchi's body of work.

Mizoguchi's camera-work is among the best in the history of the medium. His slow, graceful tracking shots are the absolute quintessence of cinematic poetry. His camera never moves too quickly or too suddenly; it is always perfectly paced with the mood and tone of the film. Furthermore, his compositions are impeccable. He immerses the viewer in diagonally oriented compositions that are not only visually stunning, but seem to perfectly echo, with a geometrical precision similar to what Kobayashi later achieved in "Harakiri" and "Samurai Rebellion", the rigid order and structure of Japanese society, particularly in his jidaigeki (period dramas) set during Japan's Edo period.

"Utamaro and His Five Women" is one such jidaigeki. It is about the real-life artist Kitagawa Utamaro, who lived toward the end of the 18th century. This subject allows Mizoguchi to execute his most thematically profound film by far. While I always profess the brilliance of Mizoguchi's formal talents, my criticism of his films has always been with their content. His meaningful dissections of Japanese society notwithstanding, Mizoguchi was never a filmmaker whose narratives contained a great deal of depth or substance. In a Mizoguchi film, the substance, the beauty, the poetry — they are almost invariably found in the film's form, not in its content. In terms of the content of his cinema, he often relied on increasingly unsubtle social messages and clumsy melodrama as his career progressed, and this has always been a stumbling block for me in my love of his films, even though my respect for him remains immense.

One of the greatest aspects of "Utamaro and His Five Women" is that it lacks the manipulated drama and overwhelming histrionics that Mizoguchi employed in so many other films. There are a few minutes late in the film where, unable to resist himself, he falters and stumbles into the muddy waters of heavy-handed dramatics, floundering about for a moment before regaining his composure. Aside from these few instants, however, the film is almost perfect. It is lighter in tone than most of his other work, and the subtext is profound on a completely different level from anything else I've seen by him.

Utamaro, here, is engaged as a surrogate for Mizoguchi himself. The parallels between these two titans of Japanese art are many, though Mizoguchi never beats us over the head with them, like I might have expected him to. Here, he employs a subtlety that is uncharacteristic of him, and it serves the film wonderfully.

Utamaro wants to "capture the soul of the woman" with his art. Mizoguchi spent virtually an entire career attempting to do exactly that (and for all my criticism of his lack of subtlety, his efforts in that regard truly can not be applauded enough). Utamaro also protests the overuse of color in painting. Like Mizoguchi, he favors restraint to indulgence. With almost a hundred films to his name, Mizoguchi made exactly two color films, both at the end of his career, just before his death (it seems that even artists like Mizoguchi and Bresson couldn't resist the changing tides forever).

Put simply, Utamaro is Mizoguchi. Of course, that's an oversimplification. It's reductive, and it's probably detrimental to the film's essence as a character study. But it's also accurate, I think. After all, how much can Mizoguchi (or anyone, almost two centuries after the fact) know about the life of Utamaro and his true nature as a human being and as an artist? Naturally, Mizoguchi has to fill in the gaps that history has left open, and naturally, he's going to turn to his own experience, his own nature, to do that. For that reason, I feel that, ultimately, while "Utamaro and His Five Women" is undoubtedly a character study, it is a character study, first and foremost, of Kenji Mizoguchi.

It is also a study of the nature of art, and the role of the artist in society (Japanese society, specifically). As an artist, Utamaro has succeeded to some extent in freeing himself from the rigid Japanese social hierarchy of that time period, but he can not truly escape it. Society pervades even art, as Utamaro is continuously spoken down to by highbrow artists who refer to him as a lowly woodblock painter. Mizoguchi detests this kind of social structure — this perceived superiority and inferiority amongst individuals in a society — and while Mizoguchi was not a communist as far as I know, one can certainly detect many leftist tendencies in his films, which are inundated with social messages, and early works like "The Song of Home" had unquestionably Marxist overtones. It's no surprise to see Mizoguchi leaning leftward on the political spectrum, since communism sought to resolve the very issues that troubled him so deeply, but Mizoguchi never bought into it in the end. ''Communism solves the problems of class,'' he once said, ''but overlooks the problems of man and woman which still remain afterwards.''

RATING: 9.00 out of 10 stars

Just a brief word: anyone interested in this very good film should read Angela Dalle Vachhe's - Painting and cinema.