1951 ‘お遊さま’ Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Shinnosuke is introduced to Shizu as a prospective marriage partner, but he falls in love with her widowed sister Oyu. Convention forbids Oyu to marry because she has to raise her son as the head of her husband's family. Oyu convinces Shinnosuke and Shizu to marry so that she can remain close to Shinnosuke.
La señorita Oyu, Oyū-sama, Pani Oyu
You can all keep your Sanshos and Ugetsus and Oharus. Miss Oyu is where it's at though. My favorite Mizoguchi now and perhaps because the protagonists here are trapped not by economic hardships but by their own rather complicated and confusing emotions, I found it way more moving than any of the others. There are really no villains here. Everyone's actions can be justified, everyone is more than willing to sacrifice themselves so their loved ones can find happiness and yet, there is nothing but despair to be found. His formalism is also used to such great emotional effect here. Seemingly endless long takes of these three characters that feel balletic in their choreography as the characters move towards and…
Family as that heavy burden one carries with oneself. It moves with such a sense of purpose from a near comedy of unhappiness, the people torturing each other for the sake of the other two, towards a point of clarity.
Miss Oyu is a film of marital politics, picking apart Japanese society and the social institutions it creates around marriage. Loveless marriages are the name of the game in Mizoguchi's world. In the very first scene with our potential husband and wife pairing, a sense of awkwardness oozes from the frame. Marriage is arranged, not proposed.
Our male lead is socially inept, led by his emotions and unable to make sound decisions. But he only pays a slight price for this. The real burden falls on the women of Miss Oyu. He marries directly because he loves someone else, surely the most pathetic of reasons. The entirety of Miss Oyu is people caught in bad situations, where everyone is ignorant…
Every single scene in MISS OYU is like watching a painting come to life. The blocking, compositions, camera movements, all unreal. Mizoguchi's great cinematographer, Miyagawa Kazuo, has an eye for detail in making elegantly complex connections between characters who are desperate to maneuver over, through, and around the social rules and family politics that trap them. It's the kind of visual beauty that extends itself to the film's narrative power, lacing each character into the walls of the architecture, restraining them into the plaster of appearances, and making them less like individuals and more like loyal ornaments on a duteous family tree. Damn, what a cool picture!
The camera is so claustrophobically good here, and the positioning and movement of actors…
Hoppla! Beim durchfegen noch eine (anscheinend bzw. hoffentlich fertige?) Review zum Japanuary gefunden ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Japanuary 2022 №20 (31. Kenji Mizoguchi)
Miss O-Jein
Na fein! Herein, willkommen im Verein!
Ich hoffe, heute treffen wir erneute nette Bräute
Treffen nette Geishas, ich wette das geht was
Ich bin brav, aber ich traf eben my great love
Ich darf zwar nur im Schlaf
Doch auf sie war ich direkt schon scharf
Habt ihr den Blick geahnt
Den sie mir eben durchs Zimmer warf!
Und ich habe ein Problem, ich steh auf ihre Schwester. - Nicht auf ihre Freundin?
Würd ich auf die Freundin steh'n, hätt' ich nicht das Problem
Das wir haben, wenn sie, sie und ich uns sehen
Kommt sie in den…
É dessa limpidez do olhar que nasce uma filosofia: e eu ajunto que para ser cineasta - como para ser filósofo - é preciso, segundo Stendhal, "ser claro, seco e sem ilusões".
Rogério Sganzerla sobre Kenji Mizoguchi.
5 Directors x 5 Unseen Films - Round V: Film #10
Between this picture and Audition, I'd say dating in Japan is a bit weird.
Shinnosuke is a young man who has reached that stage of life when he must marry and start a family, and that is why he has been introduced to the shy Shizu, daughter of a good family. However, he is immediately enraptured by Oyū, the older sister, who, being a widow and having a child to care for, is out of reach. The three characters engage in a particular relationship and a dynamic that will only serve to increase their dissatisfaction and will not go unnoticed by a society that will soon point the finger at them to make a judgment.
Such is the argument of Kenji Mizoguchi's work, whose great value, at least from my point of view, is…
Having seen Shimazu's Okoto and Sasuke recently and now this, I think it safe to say Tanizaki had somewhat of an obsession with 'strange love'; not in a deviant sense but in how love drives his characters into extremes of devotion which negate the proper release or expression of their own desire, leaving them basically as servants whose desideratum is nothing but to make their master happy. This devotion exists in a state of tension with society—'the outside world'—such that its forbidden nature sees the lovers slip into their own private space wherein their pleasure becomes the totality of their waking moments: I think most of the musical performances by Okoto and Oyu, seemingly the limit of their interaction with…
Para se obter progresso só a natureza conta, e o olho é treinado pelo contato com ela. Ele se torna concêntrico olhando e trabalhando. Com isso quero dizer que, numa laranja, numa maçã, numa tigela, numa cabeça, há um ponto culminante; e esse ponto é sempre o mais próximo de nosso olho, apesar dos efeitos tremendos de luz e sombra e das sensações coloridas; as bordas dos objetos retrocedem para um centro sobre o nosso horizonte.
Paul Cézanne
Mizoguchi's wife Chieko Saga seemingly had a sister. That's something to think about.
Miss Oyu is a delicately constructed tense drama of a love sacrifice. Film portrays plight of a young man & two sisters, stuck in a tangle of love & frustration. In what could've been a silly comedic premise, Mizoguchi uses a gross thought to examine cruel perversity of a society, that places collective honour before personal contempt. One could argue that it is a sole merit of source author Tanizaki.
While, it is true to say so. Again, the essential charm comes with visual aura from Mizoguchi's picture-perfect compositions, which greatly enhances narrative power in source. It's baffling how many including Mizoguchi have called out Tanaka…
