Les femmes de la nuit

This film was produced not long after World War II when Japan was militarily defeated and its economy in total ruins. As a result a large number of people were left without money and employment was sometimes difficult to obtain. That being said, this film depicts three women who have to struggle in that regard. The first woman, "Fusaka Owada" (Kinuyo Tanaka) has just lost her young son to tuberculosis just after being informed that her husband has passed away while serving in the military. Luckily, she manages to get a job as an executive secretary working for a man she greatly admires. The second woman named "Natsuko Kimishima" (Sanae Takasugi) is her sister who has recently moved in with her and works as a dancer at a nightclub. The third woman, "Kumiko Owada" (Tomie Tsunoda) is also very close to both Fusaka and Natsuko but decides to run away from where she is living in search of something new and exciting. For her efforts she falls in with the wrong crowd and is subsequently raped and forced to become a prostitute. Now rather than reveal any more I will just say that I found this movie to be a bit too dark and brutally harsh for my tastes. No doubt others will disagree and that is fine. However, the relentless savagery depicted by the director (Kenji Mizoguchi) was overdone in my view and because of that I have rated it accordingly. Average.

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.

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.

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.

Kenji Mizoguchi is arguably the greatest Japanese film-maker ever and it is truly a pity, therefore, that this is only the fifth film of his I have watched; luckily, the host of the Italian TV programme which showed WOMEN OF THE NIGHT promised that they will be screening a few more of his films in the near future. In any case, even if I found precious little reading material on the film, that same host dubbed it a "masterpiece" and a French review I found on the Internet said that it was "absolutely unmissable"! Having now watched it, I can verify that it was no idle praise.

Mizoguchi is well-known for being a feminist director and his extensive filmography is full of studies of downtrodden Japanase women of both contemporary and past eras. This happens to be the first bona-fide "women's picture" of his I have watched and even if it may be a notch less appealing than his very best films, UGETSU (1953) and SANSHO THE BAILIFF (1954), it is nevertheless an exceptionally well-made and moving film with a typically strong central performance from Mizoguchi regular Kinuyo Tanaka. Besides, Mizoguchi's remarkably unsentimental outlook ensures that facile answers to the questions raised are kept well at bay but without rendering the film unnecessarily depressing or bleak.

The plot deals with three post-WWII women (from the middle-aged Tanaka to a teenage acquaintance of hers) who all gradually and unwillingly turn to prostitution to make ends meet. The "women of the night" are depicted as being either cynical and bitter (like Tanaka who, despite being infected with disease, still keeps on prostituting herself so as to carry out her revenge on all manhood after being betrayed by her employer/lover), nymphomaniacs (who usually take out their own frustrations on the newer 'recruits') or, worse still, disease-ridden yet pregnant (like Tanaka's younger sister). The kindly doctors who shelter the loose women when in labor are ultimately powerless to prevent them from going back to plying their dangerous trade once they have delivered their usually stillborn children. The devastating final sequence (superbly executed through Mizoguchi's peerless mise-en-scene) portrays just such an occurrence in which Tanaka literally tries to beat some sense into her sister when she joins her on the streets once more, at which point the rest of the prostitutes either vent their anger on the two for scaring off potential customers with all the commotion or take the sisters' side for seeking a way out of their profession.