Desperate prostitutes fight over customers in powerful STREET OF SHAME (courtesy Janus Films)
STREET OF SHAME (AKASEN CHITAI) (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1956)
Film Forum
209 West Houston St.
Saturday, April 16, 1:00, 4:30, 8:00
Series continues through April 21
212-727-8110
www.filmforum.org
Made the same year Japan passed a major anti-prostitution law, Kenji Mizoguchi’s final film, 1956’s Street of Shame, is a brutally honest depiction of the decidedly unglamorous life of a group of courtesans at a Tokyo brothel. “Yoshiwara has been here three hundred years,” the Mamasan (Sadako Sawamura) says early on to a police officer. “Does an unnecessary business last so long?” Originally titled Red-Light District, the black-and-white film features an outstanding cast of women playing desperate geisha with serious family and financial problems that lead them to the embarrassment of trying to physically force men off the dark, dank street and into their rooms. Hanae (Michiyo Kogure) has to deal with aging, a baby, and a suicidal husband, Yumeko (Aiko Mimasu) doesn’t want her son to know what she does to earn money to attempt to give him a decent life, Yorie (Hiroko Machida) thinks a husband in a faraway village will gain her longed-for freedom, Yasumi (Ayako Wakao) has become a loan shark to her coworkers, and young Mickey (Machiko Kyō) is quick to share her opinions about the other women but not so quick to catch on to the debasement she is lowering herself to. The protofeminist director of such previous works as Sisters of the Gion, Osaka Elegy, Women of the Night, and The Life of Oharu as well as the brilliant two-part samurai epic The 47 Ronin, Mizoguchi spent much of his career — which included more than seventy films in thirty-three years, up to his death in 1956 at the age of fifty-eight — making films about the exploitation of women, partly influenced by having seen his sister sold into prostitution by their father. It’s a shame that Street of Shame, one of Mizoguchi’s best, also turned out to be his last, but what a way to go. Street of Shame is screening April 16 with Keisuke Kinoshita’s Carmen Comes Home (1951) as part of Film Forum’s “5 Japanese Divas” series, four weeks of films starring Kyo, Isuzu Yamada, Tanaka, Machiko Kyo, Setsuko Hara, and Hideko Takamine, who play strong, determined women in such classic works as Ozu’s Early Summer (1951) and Tokyo Story (1953), Hiroshi Teshigahara’s The Face of Another (1966), Mikio Naruse’s Okaasan (1952) and Flowing (1956), Akira Kurosawa’s The Idiot (1951) and Throne of Blood (1957), Kinoshita’s Twenty-Four Eyes (1954), and Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), among others.
In Bertrand Tavernier’s sweeping romantic epic, young and beautiful Marie de Mézières (Mélanie Thierry) has a big problem: It seems that every man she meets falls in love with her. Already in a passionate relationship with the heroic Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel), a leader of the Catholics against the Protestant Huguenots in the French Wars of Religion of the 1560s, Marie is suddenly part of a shady deal between her father (Philippe Magnan) and the Duke de Montpensier (Michel Vuillermoz), marrying her off to the rather uninspiring though steadfast Prince Philippe de Montpensier (Grégoire Leprince-Ringuet), who warms to his bride much quicker than she to him. Returning to the battlefield, Philippe asks his mentor, the older and wiser Count de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), to teach Marie in the ways of the court to prepare her for meeting Catherine de Medici, but even such a solid, moralistic man as Chabannes — who deserted from the army after killing a peasant family, supposedly in the name of his lord and saviour — cannot prevent himself from succumbing to the many charms of his unaware charge. And when she meets the wild and unpredictable Duke d’Anjou (Raphaël Personnaz), the king’s brother is smitten as well. But through it all, Marie, a modern woman who wants to learn to write and make her own choices, remains fiercely drawn to Henri, a forbidden love that threatens dire consequences. Based on the 1662 novella by Madame de La Fayette, The Princess of Montpensier is a thrilling tale of love and war, of honor and betrayal. Master filmmaker Tavernier (The Clockmaker of Saint-Paul, A Sunday in the Country), who cowrote the daring script with longtime collaborator Jean Cosmos and François-Oliver Rousseau, focuses on character and story rather than pomp and circumstance, creating an intoxicating intimacy often missing from the genre. Thierry is alluring as Marie, who can be seen as an early feminist in a time when women were little more than possessions. Even at two hours and twenty minutes, the film flies by; you’ll feel sorry you can’t spend more time with the many wonderfully drawn characters who help make The Princess of Montpensier such a marvelous treat.
