Early 20th-century Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, author of Tragic Sense of Life, distilled the essence of his career as a thinker when he said: “My religion is to seek for truth in life and for life in truth, even knowing that I shall not find them while I live.” Kenji Mizoguchi — who ranks, according to critical consensus, with Yasuhiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa as one of the last century’s very greatest Japanese filmmakers — subscribed to a similar creed, or non-creed, predicated on a resigned acceptance of human vanity that nevertheless allowed for a lifelong search, in his art, for qualities with which the world is generally stingier than we would like, such as beauty, grace, kindness and love. He found no more than traces of such qualities among the misery and desolation depicted so vividly in THE LIFE OF OHARU, Mizoguchi’s favorite of his own works, but in it he produced a film that embodies them with as much permanence as entropy permits.
Although not a consoling work, OHARU is imbued with the same long-suffering, indefatigable dignity that animates its eponymous protagonist, played across thirty years and an unbroken series of degradations by the exceptional Kinuyo Tanaka. The film’s narrative, set in late 17th-century Japan and based on a contemporaneous novel from which it radically departs in key aspects, concerns the steadily downward spiral of Oharu, a teenaged lady-in-waiting at a nobleman’s estate when we meet her who has become a penniless, streetwalking prostitute of fifty by the time we leave her, or she leaves us, more than two hours later. Her first mistake — and a serious one, at least by the standards of her place and time — is to fall in love and agree to elope with a man beneath her station, a crime for which her beloved is beheaded, she is disgraced, and her family loses its home and titles.
Things don’t get any better from there. Subjected to the prejudices and machinations of a rigidly patriarchal society in which women exist primarily as ornaments, help meets, and sexual objects — and additionally subjected, when that isn’t quite bad enough, to simple, atrocious luck — Oharu falls rung by rung ever further down the rickety ladder of social standing, and there is nothing her fundamental decency and blamelessness can do to prevent her from hitting bottom. What Mizoguchi seems to propose — not only via plot and dialogue, but through the recurrence of austere, coldly majestic compositions in which Oharu, seen from above, appears small, alone, abandoned — is that her only way out is, finally, to give up; to accept the Buddhist maxim that pain derives from desire, and desire cannot be sated. This is not a redemptive tale of political, or even personal, progress. But it does amount to a kind of pilgrimage, one riven with pity and sorrow, in which, as we fall with Oharu, we shed our illusions with her, too. We may put them back on again later, or trade them in for new ones, but we’re unlikely to forget our glimpse of Oharu, and maybe ourselves, naked in the void.
Check out a clip here
5/31 – 7pm
136 minutes
$9
Harvard Film Archive
Carpenter Center
24 Quincy St.
Cambridge, MA
02138
