Tonight I watched the second Mizoguchi movie in my own personal cinematheque retrospective, entitled "Sisters Of The Gion" (1936). The young actress Isuzu Yamada once again stars (as she did last week) as a geisha who lives with her older sister (Yoko Umemura) in the Gion District of Kyoto. The Gion is, among other things, an area of town where the pleasure palaces are located, so naturally the geisha live nearby. Yamada and her sister - also a geisha - are living in poverty and their situation is made worse when one of the older sister's "patrons", now destitute himself after he is foreclosed and his belongings auctioned off, comes to live with the sisters. The Yoko Umemura character is a traditional geisha, subservient to men even at her own expense. But her younger sister is a firebrand. She declares that she "hates men", as the patrons lord themselves over the geishas with little to no respect for their humanity.
I break in to say that I do not know the exact differences between a geisha and a prostitute, although it appears that the geisha is like a "paid" wife, or "kept woman" who does a whole lot more than just provide the immediate sex of a prostitute, though it seems sure that a geisha also is used for sex. I mention this because in every traditional Japanese movie I have seen (by Ozu or Mizoguchi, maybe Kurosawa too), there is always a politeness used to describe the requirements of the geisha profession. The men are clearly shown as "johns", but more in a familial way, because he is permanently or semi-permanently supporting the geisha, and she takes care of him in all the ways that a wife would, in the formerly accepted male-female traditions of marriage, and especially in a country like Japan.
But the "patron" is still a "john" because he treats the relationship as business, whereas the geisha is expected to put her heart and soul into it.
This is how it is depicted by Mizoguchi in the two films I have seen, and while he professed not to be a feminist filmmaker, it is clear where his sympathies lay and rightly so. Japan was an entirely male dominated society until 70 years ago and still is in many respects I would imagine.
At any rate, I thought I would include that aside on the geisha, because I have always wondered about the way they have been portrayed in movies over the years. Mizoguchi was way ahead of his time because he was confronting the issue of women's rights back in 1936, five years before WW2 when Japan allied with Germany (another male dominated psychotic regime) in an attempt to take over the world. So Mizoguchi was telling it like it is, way back then.
In the story, told in a concise 69 minutes, the younger sister hates men, hates being a geisha, and so uses her wiles and her beauty in a way to manipulate and prey on the men in her circle and that of her more traditional sister. First, she takes it upon herself to evict the sister's destitute former patron. She does this without telling her sister, who now has no idea where the man has gone or why. Next, the younger sister sets her sights on a wealthy patron for her sister, but the man falls for her instead, so she uses him to play against a young tailor, a kimono maker, who is in love with her also but whom she has swindled.
The plot involves only a handful of people : the two sisters and four or five men, but the script is layered like an onion skin, and every time a layer is peeled back, another machination is underway at the hands of Isuzu Yamada, who is out to enrich herself, and in attempting to ensnare a patron while moving the other chess pieces around the board, she demonstrates her own ruthlessness, every bit as bad as a man's - but as Mizoguchi ultimately notes - her anger and psychology is derived from her experience. She has not been passive to it, as her older sister had been trained to be, and so she wound up fighting fire with fire.
There are other factors that play into her fate, but I will tell you no more.
These early Mizoguchi films are new to me, and I was not too familiar with his work to begin with.
His camera is usually stationary, like Ozu's, but his editorial style is much more concise. No long takes. Every scene punches directly into the next. Every sentence of dialogue states exactly what is meant to be said to move the plot forward. There is no meandering, no cinematic navel gazing.
This is "just the facts, ma'am" filmmaking, telling the exact story of what happens to these two sisters and to the men who wish to be their patrons. It is shot in non-technically explicit black and white, meaning that it looks great even though the lighting isn't studio quality in every scene.
It just looks like real life, played out by great actors.
Thus Two Thumbs Way Up and the highest Five Star rating. A simple, short film without a lot of modern day cinematic conventions that nevertheless tells a gripping story that cannot be turned from.
Elizabeth, if you are reading I am glad you made it to the airport, whatever your destination may be. It goes without saying that flat tires are the worst, so good thing AAA was quick to get it repaired. Maybe you are working on a new film? If so, best wishes as always. Glad you posted. Post more too if you get a chance. :)
I began the new book by Bill Clinton and James Patterson today, "The President Is Missing". I don't tend to read a lot of these types of chart topping thrillers, but this one was a must read because of President Clinton, and the title, and........well, you know.
Not that there would be any hints about that, but I just wanted to see what the style would be as well as the story, because Bill Clinton is Bill Clinton, and neither he nor any other former Presidents generally engage in writing political thrillers about hard core terrorism.
I read the first few chapters and boy does it ever start off with a bang. You get to see the real Bill Clinton, if only in fiction.....
Read it, watch "The Sisters Of Gion", and that's all I know for tonight. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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