Shinnosuke is introduced to Shizu as a prospective wife, 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.
EN
“And then the manner of it – meaning, how to describe the very singular emotion which gets hold of us at each viewing or re-viewing of a Mizoguchi film? I would make a stab at a metaphor, and so as not to give these films any over-worthy and sublimatory image, I would select a rather trivial one. Imaging yourself sitting somewhere else. Not in the cinema theatre, but in the dentist’s chair. Ghastly? Quite. Imagine yourself, stoical but anxious, wide-eyed and wide-mouthed too. The director (what I mean is the dentist) adjusts the chair so as to get a better look. The sick tooth is approached, the cold metal instruments “burn”; this is full-scale metonymy. And when, gradually, the tooth is touched, because of the whole apparatus (I mean to say the editing) it will have become very difficult for you to distinguish between the real pain (ouch!), the blank pain wiped out by the local anaesthetic (ouch?) and the bitter satisfaction of the thought that the pain has been reached and there’s no need to look elsewhere (phew!). Good.
But there’s still something missing from this banally masochistic ritual. The music is missing, the consoling background noise of some inexplicable cheerfulness or some sublime serenity, the way it floods out of the radio on France-Musique in a never-ending stream. With Mizoguchi, those three components (the stamp of pain, the courage of lucidity and a beauty that has become foreign, even cloying) are each in step with the other. This is why his films are heartrending. This is why Miss Oyu is sublime.”
Serge Daney1
“Mizoguchi’s films conjugate three movements: the movement of the actors’ bodies, the movement of the camera, and the movement of the music. Sometimes these movements are synchronic. That’s when we speak of harmony. However, harmony does not signify story. The story commences with dissonance, the freewheeling effect, the chalk-scored board, or the snagged duration, when the movements begin desynchronising. As if (to return momentarily to our dental metaphor) the consolatory music were to become stuck, the local anaesthetic ceased to function, and the picture collapsed along with the chair. Mizoguchi restrains his actors, camera, and music on a leash that is only ever slackened to catch them once more. Therein lies his cruelty.”
Serge Daney2
“But these films – that, in an unknown tongue, tell us stories utterly foreign to our customs and our ways –, these films actually do speak to us in a familiar language. What language? The only one to which, all things considered, a filmmaker should lay claim: that of the mise-en-scène. […] If music is a universal idiom, then the same goes for mise-en-scène: it is this language that should be learned to understand ‘Mizoguchi,’ not Japanese. A common language, but wielded here to such a degree of purity that our Western cinema has seldom known.”
Jacques Rivette3
- 1Serge Daney, “Miss Oyu,” Serge Daney in English, 8 November 2020. Originally published as “Mizogochi et la dure loi du désir,” in Libération on 12 December 1988.
- 2Serge Daney, “Mizogochi and the Hard Law of Desire,” 1986.
- 3Jacques Rivette, cited in “About Kenji Mizoguchi,” Sabzian, 24 August 2016. Originally published as “Mizoguchi vu d’ici,” in Cahiers du Cinéma n° 81, March 1958.
