Although, like most cinephiles, I revere Kenji Mizoguchi, honesty compels me to report that watching his 1939 The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums is hard labor. There are a number of reasons for this, but, most notably, the subject is a little thin, even threadbare -- the film's melodramatic story is so bathetic and sentimental that it would shame a Hollywood hack from the same era. From a cynical perspective, one could argue that Mizoguchi's material is so barren and cliché-ridden that the director feels compelled to lend false weight to story by tricking it out in a relentlessly mannered mise-en-scene. About half the shots are puzzles -- the viewer has to work out the subject of the shot that has been intentionally hidden in a jumble of shadows and lattice-work. Most of the images are filmed from a distance too remote to allow us to see what we have been trained to desire -- a close-up of an emoting face. In fact, there are no close-ups in the entire film and nothing like montage -- most of the shots are sequence-shots averaging two or three minutes, a few of them as long as nine minutes. At every stage in the proceedings, Mizoguchi seems dead-set on making his audience occupy the worst seats in the house -- he deliberately de-emphasizes the melodrama by making it hard to see. One watches the film with awe at Mizoguchi's ingenuity in delaying audience recognition as to key points, his indirection, and his elaborate moving camera shots that seem perversely designed to make it as hard as possible to see what is significant in the image. At every juncture, Mizoguchi constructs the film to avoid close-ups. He is similarly adverse to editing the scenes -- by setting his camera a long way from the action or stuffing the frame full of people and things so that he can subtly re-position to highlight narrative points, the director can avoid montage. At one point, he refuses to cut away when his hero laboriously wraps the sash of his robe about his waist and, then, ties it -- a process that takes about 45 seconds; in other scene, a character uses her hairpin to pick seeds out of a watermelon, the camera impassively recording the entire operation. The lengths to which Mizoguchi goes to avoid the standard expressive syntax of cinema -- that is, inserted shots, montage, expressive close-ups -- is truly extraordinary and The Story... is so single-minded in its rejection of these devices to qualify the pictures as something like an experimental film, an example of avant-garde filmmaking of a particularly challenging type. (I am mindful that I saw The Story... on a TV with a large, but not enormous screen; Mizoguchi's images are designed to be projected in a format that is 40 feet wide -- I think some of the difficulty that a person watching on TV experiences might be moderated if the image were large enough to be explored without squinting, something that would surely be the case in a movie-house.)
Another difficulty posed by The Story... relates to its subject matter -- the Kabuki theater. The film features three extended sequences documenting Kabuki performances and, of course, a Western audience is clueless in evaluating this sort of material. This is problematic because the plot turns on audience response to the recondite art of Kabuki acting. Kiko, a young actor, has been adopted as a foster son by a famous Kabuki star. Kabuki is dynastic -- that is, fathers pass down to their sons the tricks of the trade. (Like Shakepeare's theater, it's an all-male enterprise.) Unfortunately, Kiko is not a very good actor -- his peers tell him that skill comes with experience, but he doesn't seem well-equipped as an artist in this theatrical form. Kiko's father begets a biological child and a wet-nurse is procured to care for the baby. The wet nurse, Otoku, a woman from a lower middle-class or, even, peasant background, turns out to be a devotee of Kabuki. She acknowledges that Kiko is a bad actor but thinks that he can become more accomplished with her assistance. Kiko falls in love with the young woman and this appalls his foster father. He disinherits the young man who elopes with the wet nurse, Otoku. For five years, Kiko works on perfecting his art in provincial theaters and, then, as an itinerant actor with a troupe of traveling players. He gradually improves and becomes successful, although he and Otoku live in poverty, consigned, it seems, to the margins of a theatrical practice that is centered in Tokyo. Otoku pleads with Kiko's brother and the actor graciously consents to allow Kiko to perform a key role, substituting for him, in a show featuring their formidable father. (Mizoguchi inserts a bit of humor here: he has someone say that Kiko will regain his self-confidence and his masculinity by appearing in the production with his father. But the part is that of a courtesan and involves much simpering and flitting about the stage in stylized women's garments.) The show is a success. Otoku is welcomed to the famous actor's family -- he has forgiven her because she has served as a muse to his erring son and helped him to perfect his art. After another triumphant performance featuring the old Kabuki star and his two sons (they play lion cubs dancing beside their leonine father), Kiko is acknowledged as a star. But Otoku is now dying; the harsh conditions of their life as itinerant players has damaged her irreparably. Kiko visits Otoku who is dying in a shabby boarding house. Then, he is feted in a spectacular night-time river procession, big barges rowed through the lagoons and channels of old Edo -- we see Kiko acknowledging the adoration of his fans while poor Otoku is dying in a tenement on the other side of town.
The scenes involving the Kabuki performances are fascinating, although Mizoguchi doesn't want those theatrics to overwhelm his melodrama and, accordingly, shoots the spectacle from deliberately inexpressive and remote angles. (We see much of the action through mazes of rope, counterweights, and scenery backstage.) In the scene in which Kiko plays a courtesan (who is really the spirit of a cherry tree), we don't know whether the hero is acting competently or failing miserably. Mizoguchi must be confident that his Japanese audience can't gage the effectiveness of the performance either. The suspense in the protracted scene is noteworthy but exists only because the performance registered is so mannered and remote from reality that we don't know the criterion by which it should be judged. Mizoguchi seems as ignorant as the audience and we have no clue that Kiko is succeeding spectacularly until the audience reaction at the end of the show. (Kabuki seems to be some kind of lavishly staged combination of dance and opera -- the scene with the courtesan involves her haranguing a woodsman with an axe and, then, engaged in decorous combat with the woodsman. Of course, as a cherry tree, she doesn't want him to chop her down.) The subject matter is remote and, of course, Mizoguchi does everything in his power to make it even more remote.
I suppose an earnest critic studying The Story... shot by shot would be able to make sense of Mizoguchi's various divagations and picture-puzzles. The reason The Story... is undoubtedly a work of genius is that all of its perverse pictorial strategies are meaningful -- you can make sense of them if you exert yourself. (In this way, Mizoguchi resembles mid- to late-period Godard: it's not easy but you can generally solve the riddles posed by his pictures.) Some elements of the mise-en-scene are probably obsessive -- in all of his films, I notice that the director has a propensity for devising "people corrals", that is wooden enclosures that fence groups of people off from the rest of the action and that serve to hold them in place. Sometimes, these corrals are little footbridges incongruously plopped in the middle of Mizoguchi's generally shadowy landscapes -- he shoots most images outdoors in Stygian gloom; even his idyllic sequences seem to be staged in the Elysian Meadows. In one scene in The Story..., we see two "human corrals" apparently channeling passengers onto a train. The chief suspense in the shot is whether the protagonists will enter the train through the corral on the far left or the central corral (or fenced walkway) -- of course, Mizoguchi is playing a trick here: there is a third corral in the foreground that is not revealed until the hero uses it to access the train. (I think the point is that the hero is riding "third class" -- that is, an indication of his poverty). Later, Mizoguchi brings this obsession to a climax by tracking first to the right, and, then, left along a series of compartments open to the camera and filled with people -- this is supposed to simulate a train with its passenger compartments arranged in a linear succession. It's an extremely complex shot, undoubtedly very expensive and wholly gratuitous -- the hero is looking for Otoku but doesn't find her. Clearly, the shot exists to indulge Mizoguchi's interest in showing groups of people restrained by, more or less, artificial barriers. In some instances, the expressive intent of Mizoguchi's peculiar staging can be readily deciphered. At the end of the movie, we see the boat procession proceeding among palaces under a leaden sky. The penultimate shot is difficult to decipher. We see a row of dignitaries from behind in shadowy silhouette -- they are watching as the boats laden with actors pass. But the foreground of the image is also a plane of black water extending up to the place where we see the profiles of the people watching the procession. The shot poses a riddle -- where are the dignitaries if we see the lagoon between the camera and their location? It takes the viewer fifteen or twenty seconds to decipher that fact that the spectators are located on a barge themselves floating in the river and that the procession is proceeding between floating barges occupied by spectators -- another example of Mizoguchi's obsessive "people corralling." This complex shot recognizes the equally complex social environment governing the film, the shadowy patterns of adulation and blame that are as fickle as anything written on water. Mizoguchi uses the puzzle-image as a way of deferring and granting greater emotional power to the film's final shot, an image of Kiko with his hands ceremonially outstretched in an ambiguous gesture that both acknowledges his fame and, yet, abjectly surrenders to it as well.
The Story... can be distinguished from Hollywood melodrama of the same general tenor by a couple of disquieting thematic factors, quite apart from the alienating camera placement and staging. First, there is little trace of any erotic attachment between Kiko and Otako --she sternly undertakes to "nourish" his achievements as an artist. Her role is secondary to his accomplishments on the stage. Her self-sacrifice is not to a man but to the principle of artistic excellence -- this makes Otako's masochistic conduct, if not palatable, at least, comprehensible. Finally, the film has an authentic bite that a Hollywood production on the same subject would probably lack. There is a terrible scene in the middle of the movie where Kiko demands money at Otako has saved -- they are both starving and no one is paying the bills for the itinerant theater company. (In a later funny scene, we see the traveling players booted off the stage by a group of ferocious-looking lady Sumo wrestlers.) When Otako refuses to give him the money, he wrestles with her and, then, callously slaps her face, blaming her for their plight. It's an alarming sequence and I don't know that a Hollywood-made movie could tolerate this bleak a view of its protagonists.
No comments:
Post a Comment