Akasen chitai

The personal tales of various prostitutes who occupy a Japanese brothel.

Okay, so the opening music is wild. And then for most of the film the music is very mellow or non-existent. What are we to make of this? I have no idea.

Criterion has put this film in their box set of Mizoguchi's "fallen women", appropriately enough. For over twenty years, he really captured women in questionable roles -- from adulteress to prostitute, and never did it in a way that exploited them or shamed them. He was honest and fair.

Some people like his early work better, some like the later stuff. This is his last film, and indeed the polished look is far different from his earliest attempts. Good or bad? Hard to say. One wonders if the war could change a man and his art...

One thing that sticks out like a wonderful, strange thumb in Kenzi Mizoguchi's (unintentional) swan song is the musical score by Toshirô Mayuzumi. With the exception of a couple of scenes, like when one of the older women working at the Dreamland whorehouse is found on the street by another of the women as she has left her husband, the music is far from being the usual melodramatic simple strings and flutes or whatever. The music for Street of Shame is warped, twangy, accentuated by the the playing of that weird one string instrument (if you've heard Jack Nietzche's score for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest you know what I mean), not supplying the emotional context but observing it, setting an unusual tone for scenes that go between melodrama and naturalistic acting. The music by Mayzumi is sad but not the way you'd think; it perfectly puts us in a world that should be the "other" but there's something familiar about it, which fits since these characters, all women servicing clientèle to pay off debts and support their families, are here because it's a job, nothing more.

The film itself is conventionally structured in terms of the ensemble: several women including Mickey, Yumeko, Yasumi, go through the few ups and the many downs of being a prostitute in a city and country that is very mixed about it. It's legal, but there's rumblings on the radio about a vote coming up about whether to ban it for, basically, the reasons it's illegal here in the United States (not too oddly though, prostitution became illegal shortly after the film was released). Mizoguchi handles the social strata of this with tact and care. It's not something that needs to be turned into a message-story, because the women themselves are the message. He leaves it up to the audience on whether to decide on it; at the least he doesn't paint any characters to be total monsters or caricatures, which include the Man and Madam of the Dreamland house are down the line businesspeople, offering these women a way to pay off debts in an atmosphere that the government doesn't really care about, "that they just talk and make money".

But in leaving it up to the audience, he offers up a very strong case for how prostitution does, in a realistic setting, disrupt and break up lives, and curse some to their respective fates. In one plot line a girl dupes a businessman by asking him to pay off her BIG debts (i.e. 150,000 yen) with the fooled intent of marrying him; another, Mickey, is the bright and chipper one until her father comes to call bringing a whole volcanic scene that at the end she replies "what is this, a movie?"; an older woman working there keeps trying to call her son, only for him to split ways with her due to the shame it's caused him (he goes a little over the top explaining "the whole world knows", but it still works in that scene on the street); and a young mother of a baby has to find ways to help her sickened husband to get by.

On the surface, these stories don't seem like they would make for a tragic mosaic of existential circumstance. But this is what it is, a movie that features so much life that it ultimately is very heartbreaking to watch. The women are all strong but there's that weakness that is brought on by society's double-standard: it's not seen as something acceptable to go about working in this business, but what else will the women do to work? Some may get married, but at what cost? Mizoguchi's triumph is in making it something Japanese society can relate to and contemplate, but firstly it's about character, about them being three-dimensional: fragile very deep down but with a veneer that says "yeah, this is what I am, whadda ya want?" Most touching of all, with the music included, is at the end when the young new girl (a virgin) is put to her first night on the job, with her looking on in a daze and awe on a booming-business night. It's really remarkable work by a master of his craft.

Watching this movie almost makes me feel like delivering an apology to Mizoguchi. Thanks to the wonderful Masters of Cinema releases of his movies I've been slowly working my way through his late period movies. I love them, but I felt that the failure of so many was an excessive formality - a feeling that his characters were not real people, more symbols of various levels of society. This movie is totally different, it is packed with wonderfully realized, vivid characterizations. Ironically, its his last film, but rather than being a swansong it was absolutely cutting edge - the film has a thoroughly modern feel to it, even down to its weirdly avant garde music (the one thing about it I have to say grated with me). And I understand it was one of his biggest commercial hits, a huge success in its day.

The story follows a group of prostitutes in 'Dreamland' a typical brothel of its day in the nighttime quarter of Toyko, shortly before they were made illegal. At the time, brothels were seen as mildly disreputable, but still legitimate businesses. The women work 'voluntarily', but most are trapped due to debts and poverty. They range from the tough, selfish and westernized 'Mickey', a wonderful Machiko Kyo (unrecognizable from the ghost in Ugetsu), the very beautiful Ayako Wakao as the angelic looking but thoroughly ruthless Yasumi, Aiko Mimasu as the aging Yumeko, and a variety of other characters, all without exception wonderful and believable performances.

While humanizing all his characters, Mizuguchi doesn't pull punches about the desperate poverty of the time and the dire straits the women are in. The brothel owner repeatedly insists he is like a social worker, looking after poor women - and he is so convincing he believes it himself. The script never falls into the trap of didactic sermonizing, it simply lets the stories speak for themselves. Maybe Mizoguchi, who was no stranger to brothels in his private life had deeply ambiguous feelings for them himself.

Its interesting to compare this movie to another similar one of this period (and a personal favourite of mine) - Mikio Naruse's 'Flowing', which is much less direct and harsh, with more of an air of sadness at how a part of Japanese society was fading away - but then again, that film was set in a more genteel upmarket geisha house.

This is an immensely fine movie - structurally its amazing that such a complex story with so many characters could be so convincingly told in a relatively short run time - a lesson to all modern film makers. Its absolutely riveting and a masterclass in film making and acting.

But as a final point, films like this are often difficult to end - there is no clear way of finishing a story without a clear narrative arc and how many times have we all seen great movies that let us down with a contrived or poorly thought through ending? I won't give it away, but the ending of 'Akasen Chitai' is quite unexpected and absolutely devastating. Its starkness should by rights leave it up there with the famous last scene in '400 Blows' as one of the greatest in cinema history.

As its better known English title attests Mizoguchi's last film deals with the subject of prostitution but like several of the masterpieces that preceded it, it really deals with the role of women in Japan, a subject Mizoguchi returned to over and over again. "Street of Shame" is set in the present, or at least in post-war Japan, and the government are proposing anti-prostitution laws that will close the brothels down. As it is, the women who work in 'Dreamland' earn little enough.

As you might expect Mizoguchi pulls no punches. For these women life is pretty much hell with survival the name of the game. It is, of course, beautifully acted by all the women concerned and for a film dealing with such dark subject matter, isn't without humour. If the film is no masterpiece it is still quintessential Mizoguchi as well as being one of the best 'women's pictures' of the fifties. Melodrama it may be but, like the best melodramas, this one has the ring of truth.

Visiting any of the great masters (Ozu, Kurosawa, Mizoguchi) always galvanizes me into action. I watched "The End of Summer" (1961) and was hooked. I had to see this, a late Mizoguchi, before seeing another Ozu. You know, for the rhythm. And while they are completely different in so many ways, both create such poetry that usually it takes forever for me to watch their films, since I repeatedly have to pause the film to be soaked in the images.

"Street of Shame" (1956), Mizoguchi's last film, is no different in this respect, although it does carry that ominous "last film" aura over its head, which always bodes for some sinister stuff in my personal brooding, regardless of whether the film is comic or not.

The music is provoking. It sounded so much like something out of an Imamura film that I had to wonder whether I had accidentally put in "The Insect Woman" (1963), a film I had been watching recently as well. Constantly it makes you feel that everything's slipping into a chasm, whence there's no return. And things, how do they go wrong.

The film has, overall, a very modern feel to it. Not only in the subject matter, which is in stark contrast with the jidai-geki Mizoguchi is most famed for. It's also the spirit of the film, the aesthetics, the technique. It certainly hasn't got the slightest sense of a "last film" to it.[1] On the contrary, this is a testament in the other sense of the word: evidence of his artistic vitality and boldness in choosing the unsafe way, embracing the risk. Pretty much aligned with what the film is about.

Speaking of Imamura, the film would work well alongside Imamura's masterly explorations of the seedy Japanese subcultures, or "Bakumatsu taiyôden" (1957), Kawashima's comic masterwork. Mizoguchi, with his usual ruthlessness, shows us a world that doesn't work the way we'd like, and in which the only way to survive is to fight, and in which fighting more often than not isn't enough. "Deceive, or be deceived", and still perish.

The hidden center of the film is Shizuko, the young girl who becomes a prostitute by the very end. It's all building up for that moment, where we realize with her that, as what in the context of philosophy and Oriental religion is understood as the circle of life is, in the pragmatism of the film, reduced into a horrifying prophecy of the same things happening all over again. A life lived, yet not for oneself. It's all lies, Shizuko realizes, and excuses, and sad theatre. Sad most of all because there's no way out.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] And why should it? Mizoguchi was working hard on another film, documented well in the documentary "Kenji Mizoguchi: The Life of a Film Director" (1975) by Kaneto Shindô. Some storyboards exist, and seeing them are among the saddest moments in film I can think of. How much I'd love to have seen whatever he had in mind.