Unprecedentedly long leave of absence, due mostly to professional hazards. The best of 2018, same year's Real McCoys, countless films worth reviewing, not to mention the celebration of the Mac's 4th anniversary, fell by the wayside. Say no more, carry on regardless. Today the Mac's first review of one of the screen greatest of the greats, Kenji Mizoguchi.
Utamaro o Meguro Gonin no Onna (which, for the benefit of those among The MacMahonian's wide readership who may not understand Romanized Japanese, means “Five Women around Utamaro”) was, if IMDb is to be trusted (Mizoguchi's official filmography is exceptionally tentative, many of his silent films being lost and/or of doubtful authorship) the 76th feature film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, one of the top classic Japanese film directors, so proclaimed because he was one of the first to receive universal, meaning “western”, acclaim in the 1950s, as part of the global PR “forgive and forget” stunt instrumental to bringing Japan back to the fold of the good guys during the Cold War, and also because, like many other Japanese “great classics”, his style, taste and cultural references were heavily influenced by European culture, although that may not be evident to the untrained eye.
Utamaro o Meguro Gonin no Onna tells the story of the loves of Utamaro, one of the most renowned Ukiyo-e artists (and a prominent influence of French impressionists) and of his entourage, around the times of the painter's notorious arrest in 1804 for impious drawings. Remarkably, this was the first jiday-geki (historical film) authorized by the US occupation censorship after WWII, as the genre was suspected of flaming nationalist sentiment. The somewhat bohemian nature of the settings and the “freedom of speech” subtext reportedly mollified the censors. Maybe also because of that, and uncharacteristically for Mizoguchi, Utamaro o Meguro Gonin no Onna wraps its tragic melodrama in occasional comedic vignettes.
Mizoguchi made no secret of the parallel he liked to draw between his own life and art and that of Utamaro, both obsessively devoting their lives to pictures, moving in one case, in the other still. Like the idolatrous of yore, for both men to film of draw was, not to capture, but to possess the objects of desire, or as Utamaro is said to have put it, to paint “the essence of women”, thus seeking to have in image what reality denied.
The film mixes familiar Mizoguchi (elaborate travelling shots, single shot scenes) with techniques seldom seen in the director's work (close-ups, cutting within sequence, or the underwater sequence Busby Berkeley might not have disliked). Ultimately uneven, possibly because Mizoguchi's was recovering from the censorship of his work during the war years, and, in this viewing, in the Portuguese Cinematheque, in a copy in dire need of image and sound remastering, Utamaro o Meguro Gonin no Onna nevertheless impresses by its pervasive feather light eroticism.