Mizoguchi: Zangiku Monogatari (The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum) (1939)

The Story of the Late Chrysanthemum is a late nineteenth-century period piece that examines the tragic relationship between Kikunosuke (Shotaro Hanayagi), an aspiring kabuki actor, and Otoku (Kakuko Mori), a servant. As might be expected, it’s a romance that produces enormous suffering and resignation, but that’s also what allows Kikinosuke to finally triumph in what the film conceives as the most difficult and complex of all kabuki roles – that of the geisha. That’s an unusual education, since kabuki actors aren’t traditionally encouraged to sympathise too much with their roles - but, then again, Kikunosuke’s no ordinary actor. It’s clear that he’s too naturalistic – or cinematic – for the kabuki stage, but he’s also a little too theatrical for the film: not only is he the only character who continually appears in make-up, but Hanayagi was himself a kabuki actor, and his stylised face never quite gels with the rest of the cast. Too theatrical for cinema, and too cinematic for theatre, Kikunosuke and Hanayagi are merged into a ghostly space where cinema and kabuki can contemplate each other, resulting in one of Mizoguchi’s most inventive films to date. Most shots last at least a minute and, while there’s a great deal of camera movement, it’s always lateral, never puncturing the plane that separates us from the action and rarely venturing closer than the middle distance. At most, the camera rotates on its axis, but for the most part it’s as self-effacing as it is ingenious: there’s no phallic exhibitionism on display here, no gendering of the camera as inquisitively or intrusively masculine. As might be expected, that produces quite a sublime aesthetic, but it’s a different kind of sublimity, say, from the stillness of high Ozu. With Ozu, you sense that the camera’s contemplative stillness takes its cues from what’s happening in the scene, whereas here that stillness feels more contained by the camera, and much more extrinsic to the vulgar, vernacular details of the scenes playing out before it. In that sense, Mizoguchi anonymises and universalises the particulars of his mise-en-scene in much the same way as kabuki; it is as if the camera has put on a kabuki mask, and cinematic perception has been overlaid with kabuki perception. That enables a twofold appreciation of every shot – first, as an overwhelming collection of cinephilic particulars, thanks to Mizoguchi’s extraordinarily complex, deep-focus compositions; second, as an exhaustion of those particulars at the hands of his equally extraordinarily long shots. It’s a magical alternation that consolidates his achievements of the 1930s and paves the way for his great films of the 1950s, finding in the kabuki mask a way of collapsing the suffering of geisha into an even more universal suffering – the suffering of artists.