ReaderKenka Let's be realistic.

SpecialsTarget Disturbing yet enthralling

Cleveronix A different way of telling a story

Phillida Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

chaos-rampant I believe the challenge here was to conceive of a film in terms of bunraku - the traditional Japanese puppet theater - and extrapolate from the environment a structure, so one stage where heightened drama unfolds, controlled, with a view of the mechanisms handling the illusion, and then a second stage on the side to supply a rotation of music and voice expressing emotion. This is very well thought out, something to keep in mind when viewing later Mizoguchi where melodrama lacks annotation.This translates in our film as melodrama about a bold young woman who gambles away on her dignity and reputation because the world around her is desperate for either money or sex, the controlling mechanism is that only the viewer is in possession of all the facts and so is able to read tragic fate in every exchange. This has been noted by some viewers as film noir, because the woman appears to function as a femme fatale, but the Japanese have no affinity for this sort of trope.So of course, in accordance with bunraku, the woman is a puppeteer but also herself a puppet, a figure on the same stage as the play she enacts, her movements subject to our scrutiny. You will note this in tandem with, and reversing, an earlier Mizoguchi - The Water Magician - about a water artist whose life is merged with the transitory flows she used to control.This is beautifully rendered in a scene where she is caught with her boss on a night out to watch a bunraku play. She has set a plot in motion, attempting control, an active role, but unpredictable life foils her. The wife demands explanations but seems the most irate for noticing the hairstyle on the girl, signifying a married woman, her role on the stage being supplanted even though it's a loveless marriage and thankless role. Moments before, however, we have seen an excerpt from the play, where inside the artifice, the controlled fiction, it was the suspicious husband accusing the woman of adultery.This would have an ordinary ironic effect if mapped cleanly to the situation outside the stage, but it doesn't, it's wholly asymmetrical, the tension all in the imbalance of familiar elements framed askew. You have to puzzle about assigning to the players the puppet-master's controls. This is the touch lacking in Ozu's Floating Weeds.The music is not in the emotional after-effects of storytelling, this too part of the heightened artifice. The music is in the camera, caressing day from night.

treywillwest An exceptional film in that it redefines that cinematic, to a degree literary, trope, the femme-fatal. In this film we watch from her perspective. Her transgressions seem themselves a kind of victimization. Not only is sexuality the only tool a woman is given to empower herself in society, but her dignity and her sexuality are therefor put in an antagonistic relation to each other. Sexuality and sincerity become mutually exclusive in the world Mizoguchi paints. The cinematography is magnificent. Everyone looks compromised. But the last shot lets us know which victim's compromise cuts the deepest and. A feminist work in the most profound sense.

crossbow0106 The first film included in the Criterion Collewction's "Mizoguchi's Fallen Women", this is the story of Ayako (a pretty great Isuzu Yamada who, according to this website, is still wonderfully with us), who is a switchboard operator who needs 300 yen to prevent her father getting in major trouble. To get the money, she spends time with her boss. This is, of course, little more than being a companion. One of Mizoguchi's gifts as a director (he also wrote the story) is that in many of his films his characters were not sympathetic yet he does not wholly judge the. The key is, what would you do? The film could never be in color, it is a noirish, gray film. The story is compelling, the acting is uniformly good, with Ms. Yamada really standing out, and the direction is, of course, flawless. I've also seen "Sisters Of The Gion" and "Streets Of Shame" from this collection. Buy it! Mizoguchi was one of the giants of 20th century cinema from any country. This film is highly recommended.

MisterWhiplash One of the early films of Kenzi Mizoguchi, apparently the one that got him his first wide acclaim and box-office success, was a melodrama that went right for the familial gut. I think the emotional purpose, of pointing a finger right at the audience and asking "what would you do?" works because of the society that Mizoguchi was in at the time. It may be hard for some to conceive that forgiveness of something like being the "other" woman for a married man and getting arrested for a petty crime would be impossible, but in Osaka Elegy this is exactly what occurs. We feel strongly this sense of Ayako Murai wanting to do the right thing, of being a good daughter for her father who has money problems (accused of embezzlement for one thing and needing the $300), but that there's also the problem of this affair.Most of this is seen in long-takes by Mizoguchi, some well filmed and some not so much (it was 1936 and I imagine not the best equipment for, say, outdoor night shoots with little light), and we feel this cold detachment that the other characters start to feel for her, sometimes on a dime, and it leads to a point where she is just walking the streets, with nobody, a "stray" with no job and no family. I know I'm spoiling but it's important to point out the context - this is a drama that is so embedded in the melodrama of this story, of these characters struggling and being stubborn all the way, be it Ayako's father or even her ex-boss. If nothing else Mizoguchi makes a very strong identification with this character, and other characters like her family, and the nice young man who wants to just marry her... and deep down vise-versa.It's not the smoothest film (some of the cinematography is gorgeous but, again, it also jitters a bit and the print is worse for wear even in the Eclipse series), and a couple of the supporting performances like the cuckold wife is one-dimensional. Yet it's lead by an amazingly tender and tough and touching actress Isuzu Yamada, and a few scenes like the strange puppet theater scene or a specifically harsh scene where the nice young man discovers Ayako's true self and is in a stunned silence in the corner of the room are classics unto themselves. Certainly for any fan of the director's, even if it's not a complete masterpiece; maybe a look at the 90 minute cut, as opposed to the 71 minute one, will revise this review. 8.5/10