Up until recently,to see Aien Kyo as it's known in Japanese, since it did not circulate in the occasional travelling series devoted to the great Kenji Mizoguchi,one had to go to Japan to look at it in a collection. Thanks however to a network of DVD fansubbers, one can now catch this rarest of the director's surviving films with less difficulty, even if the existing copy is somewhat dark and fails to show his pictorial richness at its best. The story starts (with jazz under the credits alerting us that we're in the modern era)in Shinshu, a resort in the snowy mountains. Kenkichi, a graduate, doesn't want to stay to work in the lodge his parents run, and plans to go to Tokyo. His girlfriend Ohumi, a maid there, is pregnant but (money issues often coming to the fore in a Mizoguchi drama)he can't afford to take her. He relents when her uncle Murakami, whom she feels threatened by, appears. In the city they stay with Mr and Mrs Hirose, their hosts need money too (it is the Depression) but Kenkichi hasn't been looking for work, we see him lying in bed reading. Typical for Mizoguchi, she's the one who goes out, and soon a fight develops at night over her between two men, one a pimp. The other, Yoshitaro, who has a somewhat dubious reputation as well, lives in their building and gets her a job in a milk bar.(The place has an amusing English sign: Light Lunch Soft Drink). Meanwhile Kenkichi's father comes to visit and when she returns she realizes he's gone back to his family and has dumped her. A detective comes after Yoshitaro, who had used a knife in that fight. Yoshi as they also call him offers to help her later. Ohumi visits a midwife and arranges to give up her child, a boy who she wants named Kentaro. We see her with the new foster parents in an unappealing industrial landscape with smokestacks by a river. In the next scene Yoshi is on the accordion, playing in a restaurant as the camera follows him in a characteristic flowing Mizoguchi shot, We get to hear a bit of his "Parlez Moi D'Amour." A woman recognizes him.It's Ohumi, she seems different, cheaper, we learn from the dialog it's been two years, she's needed money, and is with an older man. They go to another place, but the old man ditches them and leaves them to pay the bill. After this we see her, with Yoshi lying on a park bench, they've taken his accordion as payment. They run into her uncle Murakami, the one she ran away from before, who is now more of a help and after tempura (a treat) he hires them as entertainers, brings her the boy, and takes them on the road as a travelling troupe. A scene follows with chorus girls onstage dancing to another Western tune, "My Blue Heaven." The camera moves through the murky backstage area. The troupe, we soon learn, is called Blue Sky Entertainment, and they have a struggle making a success. On a train when they're going ironically to her home town, the boy is sick, it is winter. Yoshi and Oshumi though make a good team when we see them onstage, singing and clowning, she even makes light of her previous predicament. Kenkichi is in the audience (at one moment we get his point of view of the stage) and after being uncomfortable and embarrassed goes out and meets with her uncle. Mizoguchi has composed a number of shots so far in depth, with one or more characters in the foreground, one or more in midshot, and often more characters in the background. In a long take in the eating place adjoining the theater, we see Yoshi and Oshumi enter the scene from screens in the back, only to find Kenkichi, Murakami and the boy, who were in the front of the image, have left for Kenkichi's hotel.She comes to retrieve the boy, Kenkichi is sorry she's become hardhearted and she is cold to him as she hangs up laundry in the yard. She now loves Yoshi, even though at first he didn't seem sexually interested in her. The camera follows the two men as they get into a fight, Yoshi taking out his knife again. In the next scene we are by the sea, the boy has a toy, and Kenkichi visits, then his parents. The idea is to give the child a better home with the grandparents, but Kenkichi's prejudiced father refuses. A dissolve leads us to the final shot, of Yoshi and Ohumi carrying on with their entertainment. This interesting entry in Mizoguchi's cycle of melodramas about suffering women and also about performance, is according to the credits based on my mother's favorite novel, Resurrection, but as one can tell from the synopsis I've just given, it's a loose adaptation.
The Straits of Love and Hate
(1937)
Rarest Of Surviving Mizoguchis
26 September 2013
Warning: Spoilers