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.
