Elizabeth, congratulations and best wishes on your new film! From the looks of the stills you posted on FB, good results are already guaranteed. :) Then will follow more publicity and the continued establishing of your name in the independent filmmaking world. Things are going well, I'd say. :)
Tonight I held my Mizoguchi Retrospective a night early, because Grimsley is coming over tomorrow. I watched the third film in my Eclipse dvd four pack, this one called "Women Of The Night" (1948). With a title like that, you can guess the subject matter, but what really stands out is how forcefully Mizoguchi confronts the material. He was known as a feminist director - beginning way back in the 1930s - and by 1948 he was pretty much laying the facts bare : women were being exploited in the wide spread slums of post war Japan, and they were almost seen as second class citizens.
In the city of Osaka, which suffered devastating firebombing attacks in WW2, many homes were burned to the ground, leaving families displaced and separated. Women left on their own found themselves hungry and unable to pay bills if they still had a home.
The movie tells the story of three sisters (one a sister-in-law), all of whom have lost male family members. Their parents are dead as well, and they are left to fend for themselves. The eldest sister has a small child, so she starts to sell off clothing to a local merchant in order to feed him. But her sales return only a pittance and she soon becomes desperate. The woman who runs the clothing stall then tells her about a man who can help her. He has money. He owns a factory.
Of course, this man is at first a gentleman. But, as portrayed by the actor, you can see in his eyes and by his body language that he has no real compassion. Soon his true nature comes out. He is revealed as nothing more than a wealthy pimp who has weathered the war and come out intact. In addition to turning out women, he also distributed heroin. He is pure evil, but in his mind he is justified.
Because Japan was male dominated, and because it was reduced to survival of the fittest after the war, a man like this sees himself as a victor, entitled to do as he wishes.
He plays the eldest sister, the one with the child, against her more beautiful younger sister, who is not as tough. In this way he separates the sisters and drives them both into the depths of servitude. One walks the streets at night, the other is a "dance hostess". The profession is the same, to different degrees and clientele.
Then there is the third sister, the sister-in-law. She is the youngest of the three. When she sees her older sisters succumb to the monetary promises of the factory owner, she loses hope and runs away from home. In another town, fresh off the train, she falls for the romantic line of a young man posing as a student. In reality he is one of a gang of thugs comprised of rebellious young people, men and women, who seek to entrap homeless waifs like herself, and turn them into prostitutes. The phoney "student" steals all the young lady's money, and now she is on the street herself, in an unfamiliar place.
All three sisters are now separated. The eldest one had been a traditional Japanese wife as the movie opened, modest and awaiting word of her husband's fate following the end of the war.
Now she is tough as nails, a hard bitten streetwalker who hates men.
This has been a recurring theme in the three Mizoguchi movies we have seen so far at The Cinematheque at The Tiny Theater.
Mizoguchi was clearly decrying the treatment of women in his country, and in doing so he was ahead of the USA by about 70 years.
But as he shows, it is not enough to denounce the male aspect.
The long-term women in the story, the ones who have become accustomed to life on the streets, have long since given up on redemption and are inured to their fate. They are harder than the men who seek their services, and they will try to destroy any woman among their number who wishes to leave the street life and try to go straight. They feel that their only possible survival is solidarity and an acceptance of their fate. Their sexuality has been twisted to the point where some of the women feel a squalid gratification from their work, which gives them temporary power over a man.
Of the three Mizoguchi films I have seen, "Women Of The Night" is by far the most open and frank in it's treatment of the subjugated women in patriarchal Japan. This is not to say that the other two films (previously reviewed) downplayed the subject. Far from it. But "Women Of The Night" intensifies it to a cry for help in a country that had to start all over again after being bombed to near oblivion but was still unwilling to let go of it's old ways.
Which, to extend the metaphor, is why we've been there as a military presence since 1945.
Directors like Kenji Mizoguchi and Yasujiro Ozu saw it coming. They were artistic giants whose work was far ahead of it's time.
"Women Of The Night" gets Two Thumbs Way Up, though it is not easy to watch.
Tomorrow night I will be writing from home, off work until next Monday.
See you in the morn. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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