Les femmes de la nuit

Fusako Owada, a young woman in postwar Japan, is the mistress of a notorious drug dealer. Fusako's tenuous grasp on meaningful life is shaken when she learns that her lover is having an affair with her sister.

This film is generally dismissed as one of Mizoguchi's "lesser" films, and has been called a "good melodrama" -- something of a backhanded compliment. I like to think it was a bit more than that.

Aside from the drug aspect and the sister relationship, just the mistress status alone is worth examining. This is a very emotional part, as can be seen when the secretary asks if her boss really likes her. He gives a response along the lines of "I will try to be more affectionate." She is craving real love, and he is only acting the part...

Three disparate women end up selling themselves to survive in a bleak post-war Osaka. Like a number of Mizoguchi's films, 'Women of the Night' is a harsh commentary about the conditions and behaviours that many women were forced to endure in pre- and post-war Japanese society. The film is not particularly nuanced, and the director delivers his message with a heavy and unsubtle hand as the women's lives rapidly go from bad to worse to horrible (one of the women, desperate for money, tentatively approaches a sleezy procuress and the next time we encounter her, she's a tough, diseased, street-walking junkie). Despite the occasional weaknesses in pacing and character development, there are some devastating scenes, notably when a young run-away, intrigued by the 'glamorous lifestyle' of a dance-hall hostess, discovers just how mean the mean-streets of Osaka can be. The ending of the film is weaker than the build-up - the final scenes of the prostitutes fighting on a set that appears to be the ruined shell of a church with intact stain-glass windows (featuring the Virgin no less) are artificial, overly melodramatic, and a bit trite. Mizoguchi 'wears his heart on his sleeve' in his films about the travails of Japanese women but he has done so better in other films, such as 'Sisters of the Gion' (1936), 'The Life of Oharu' (1952) or 'Street of Shame' (1956). Watched with English subtitles.

I had seen this movie back when I was a kid, in the 1960's. Thought it was great. Today, though, I can see why I liked it so much back then, but how the acting is actually pretty bad, and the story is pretty inconsistent with actual history. Never the less, it was a nice trip into nostalgia for a Saturday afternoon. Just don't expect too much.

Women of the Night is absorbing as a story of post-war malaise among women, of a lack of hope in their futures. It continues Kenji Mizogichi's body of work dedicated to showing women in a society that is perpetually against them, to greater or lesser degrees (usually greater, depending on time and place). While his final film, Street of Shame, is probably his best and most entertaining, this film does have some memorable moments. It tells of two women, one of whom finds out near the start of the film that her husband has died, and after this becomes a "fallen woman" by being a drug dealer's woman on the side. Another drifts into prostitution, or rather almost becomes it, and the two of them get swept up into a women's prison-cum-hospital. One of them, eventually, escapes (this is the most visually striking single shot in the film, by the way, tracking as she struggles across the wire fence).

It's slow moving, even for 73 minutes, though to be fair the American cut feels like it's been cut up, so a recommendation may be half-hearted by default (sometimes it's hard to tell, other times, it looks like an editor cut right into a scene just when it's about to get really good). The performances by Tanaka and Takasuhi, and the actress playing Kumiko, a friend of their characters, are all strong to the degree they're asked, and the climax of the film carries some real power even in the midst of the melodrama and the whole "maybe we have screwed up our lives and should go home" conclusion forced on an audience. But Mizoguchi's aim is, for the most part, met: give the audience a view of this underworld of women without solid footing, and ask why this really is the way it is when these women could be doing other things or working as opposed to just being married or like this. And at the same time make them all human, and not (too) stereotyped. It's ultimately hopeful, but some cynicism in the process goes a long way.

Startling, forceful tale of women descending into a life of prostitution in post-war Osaka. Kinuyo Tanaka, who would play the lost mother of the protagonists in Sansho the Bailiff, stars as a woman who lost both her husband and son to illness long after the war has ended. When her younger sister, Sanae Takasugi, steals the man she's having an affair with, she joins the streetwalkers. Mizoguchi was heavily influenced by Italian Neorealism here, and most of it was filmed in the ruined streets of Osaka. It's blunt as Hell, and arguably exploitative. Mizoguchi disowned it later in his career. The two best sequences in the film, one where a group of prostitutes denudes a young rape victim, and the final one where Tanaka comes to the rescue of the same girl when another group of prostitutes is attacking her, are the seeds that would spawn Seijun Suzuki's Gate of Flesh. That's definitely a compliment, in my book. That final sequence in particular, despite more than a little heavy-handedness (it takes place in a burnt-out church), is one of the most emotionally draining in the director's career.