☆ ☆ ☆ ½
Women of the Night (1948) – K. Mizoguchi
It is rather
surprising to see Kinuyo Tanaka in the role of a prostitute but the great
actress easily pulls it off. She does begin the picture in a more typical role,
downtrodden and then widowed wife and mother, and only later does she turn to
prostitution. And now that I look back, I see that Tanaka played courtesans,
geishas, and, yes, prostitutes throughout her career – the roles available to
women may be few. So what is actually surprising here may be director Kenji
Mizoguchi’s bluntness and the raw post-war milieu that the characters occupy (some
have suggested the influence of Italian Neorealism). Mizoguchi was never one to
shy away from showing men’s cruelty to women and their reactions to it: often
stoic and determined and, in this case, vitriolic, as Tanaka’s Fusako seeks to
spread syphilis to all men as revenge for the callous way she was cast aside by
her boss in favour of her younger sister (this is after her husband and baby
son died). There is a lot of melodrama along the way before we get to what may
have been intended as an uplifting finale but which can’t easily wipe away the
awfulness we have seen to that point. This is not the only film to document the
social and economic problems of Japan at this time (1948) but it must be one of
the harshest.
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