Five Women Around Utamaro (1946)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

Five Women Around Utamaro (1946) – K. Mizoguchi

Having just seen the Katsushika Hokusai exhibit at the National Gallery of Victoria today, I thought the time was right to check out Kenji Mizoguchi’s film about another contemporaneous ukiyo-e woodblock print artist, Kitagawa Utamaro.  Utamaro was famous for his bijin ōkubi-e "large-headed pictures of beautiful women" of the 1790s (according to Wikipedia) and was a denizen of the red-light district of Edo, although the film shows him sublimating any erotic impulses into his art.  Even so, the women (and men) around Utamaro do nothing but give in to their passionate desires, causing endless intrigues.  Kinuyo Tanaka plays Okita, the most impetuous of local courtesans who drinks too much and chases after young Shozaburo who instead runs off with Takasode, the courtesan with the Utamaro drawn tattoo on her back.  Utamaro himself gets into trouble, first for boasting that his art is better than that of the local traditional painting school (which earns him a duel and then an acolyte) and second for making prints that displeased the shogunate (resulting in 50 days in handcuffs).  As a director, Mizoguchi had not yet reached his mature period of masterpieces (Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, The Crucified Lovers, and more) but this film has some lovely outdoor (location) shooting and some complex camerawork.  The story itself contains too many minor characters, not always clearly delineated, and therefore loses some impact.  But surely the vision of the artist consumed by their art was a deeply personal one for this director.