Mizoguchi: Utamaro O Meguru Gonin No Onna (Utamaro and His Five Women) (1946)

As Mizoguchi’s first film made during the American Occupation, Utamaro and his Five Women clearly couldn’t continue in the patriotic vein forced upon him by the war effort. At the same time, the aftermath of defeat wasn’t exactly the right time for the searing critique of his 1930s films either. As a result, Utamaro is one of the most comic, casual and autobiographical films in Mizoguchi’s career. As an anecdotal look into the life of the great printmaker, it’s got a cosy, domestic view that lends itself to multiple, partial viewings - or viewing by an expatriate American audience, since the visual language comes closer to Hollywood than any of other Mizoguchi’s other films, perhaps clearest in the preponderance of forward pans, which make his world more accessible, and take us deeper into his mise-en-scene, than would ever be permitted again. As with The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, the recourse to a male protagonist expands Mizoguchi’s perennial geisha narrative into the narrative of an artist’s growth – geisha, after all, simply means artist – except that this film’s considerably more optimistic about what it takes to achieve artistic satisfaction. Perhaps that’s because the parallels between Mizoguchi and Utamaro are so marked – in many ways, Utamaro’s defence of printmaking against painting simply plays out the defence of cinema against theatre a century earlier. Like cinema, printmaking’s presented as a mass-produced, populist, realist genre, strongest (at least according to Utamaro) when it’s black-and-white, if only because that allows its greatest asset – sharp, precise lines – to really shine. Moreover, Utamaro insists that printmaking means a new opportunity to realistically represent women, and in fact moves between printmaking and tattooing, directly inscribing his designs on the skins of his muses. And it may be that Mizoguchi’s slightly more exploratory, forward-moving camera represents his own movement from cinema to tattooing – although we’re brought closer than ever before, it’s still not that close, just enough to penetrate the upper layer of the skin. The flipside of that, though, is that there’s very little of the masterful mise-en-scene of his 1930s films, meaning that his affinity with Utamoro’s command of line and depth is not especially evident in this tribute to him. That said, Mizoguchi does draw on Utamoro’s command of the floating world to capture a lyrical rapture in nature that’s quite alien to his earlier social realism, as streams, forests and gardens abound in mystical energy – at one point the camera follows geishas underwater – gesturing towards the dream-worlds of Sansho, Ugetsu and Oharu.