User reviews

'The Life of Oharu' is not an easy film to watch. There is barely even a fleeting moment of joy/happiness and towards the end, the viewer will find himself/herself getting really angry and outraged by the unthinkable oppression and atrocities and engulf our titular protagonist. Mizoguchi's sympathetic treatment of Oharu compels the viewer to feel beaten down and horrified by Oharu's miserable plight.

The long line of tragedies in Oharu's life gets triggered by her decision to fall in love with Katsunosuke(played by the legendary Toshirô Mifune), a man of lower social standing. This element of forbidden love was also present in the previous Mizoguchi film that I watched namely 'The Story of Last Chrysanthemum'. The story arc of Otoku in that film to a some extent resembles the arc of Oharu in this one in terms of the mental and physical torture that they are both subjected to. Oharu makes an effort to conform to society's deplorable expectations, but even then gets nothing to show for it and gets discarded. This is because once she falls in social standing and gets sold off by her family, she ceases to be a human being in the eyes of society. There is a lot of references to trade and business in 'The Life of Oharu' which is relevant because Oharu over the course of her life becomes nothing more than a commodity to be sold from one customer to the next in the patriarchal society of 17th century Japan.

Mizoguchi technical mastery is again on show in 'The Life of Oharu'. Some of the long takes and extended tracking shots are truly remarkable. Mizoguchi had the ability to suggest a plethora of things like passage of time, a change in mood, etc. with one little pan movement of the camera or with just the camera placement and those features are on show here too. The interior sets are beautifully designed and the haunting music by Ichirō Saitō is used craftily from time to time to set/change the mood. Kinuyo Tanaka has to be admired for lending the sympathy inducing tender innocence to Oharu. Her performance in the scenes depicting the later stages of Oharu's life is jaw-dropping in its authenticity and humanity.

To conclude, I have to reiterate that 'The Life of Oharu' is not for everyone. One has to be in a specific mood to be able to endure the emotionally crushing narrative and storytelling of the film. But having said that, I still believe that it needs to be watched as Oharu represents numerous women(of Japan and beyond) in history and present times whose lives were and are still getting destroyed due to an oppressive society which denigrates women. It is said that Mizoguchi's obsession with capturing the misery of women in the face of oppression had its roots in his own childhood as his own sister who raised him was sold by their father. One can sense a personal grief, a personal intimacy in the style of storytelling in this particular film. Highly Recommended.

Mizoguchi's empathy for female characters is legendary. The Life of Oharu is one outstanding example. One woman's journey from member of the imperial court to elderly streetwalker is narrated in exquisite, shimmering, painful style. Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) is seduced by a man below her station. Her crime is to love the man back unreservedly. That action becomes the catalyst for a series of degradations punctuated by false dawns, as Oharu's life spirals to rock bottom. And as bleak and depressing as that sounds, Mizoguchi's storytelling, combined with Tanaka's dignified portrayal, make this film cathartic, a tragedy with a small, life-affirming message at its heart. It is a cautionary tale to the follies of social mores, and the burden that women through the ages have to endure. More than that, it is a tale of one woman's dignity through the most humiliating of circumstances. Stunning.

Kenji Mizoguchi's stunning masterpiece is a heartbreaking tale of purity in a world of corruption. Based on a seventeenth-century novel by Saikaku Ihara called The Woman Who Loved Love, the film tells the story of Oharu, a young woman who in her younger days worked as a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial Palace of Kyoto, but having fallen in love with a man below her rank is expelled from the palace, and she and her parents are forced to live in exile. Try as she might to find love in her relationships, she is constantly thwarted by her society's low expectations for a woman's heart and her father's ambitions for respectability, and soon descends to being a concubine, later a streetwalking prostitute. Mizoguchi's tones are so gentle and poetic that every frame works its way into your heart, and in such a delicate manner. Kinuyo Tanaka's performance as Oharu is beautiful as well, abandoning the melodramatic gestures common to Japanese film acting and going straight for the heart. Sumptuous production design and a decidedly feminist message make a film well worth seeing.

I cannot agree with the reviewer who commented that Mizoguchi does not have the aesthetic sensibility of Kurosawa or Ozu. In fact, he appears to me to be the true master of Japanese cinema. 'Oharu' is a marvellous achievement - a compassionate, beautiful account of a quite astonishing fall from privilege and grace into destitution and despair. It is unremittingly bleak and yet due to Mizoguchi's genius and Kinuyo Tanaka's luminous portrayal of the unlucky Oharu, it is a spiritually compelling work, with sheer artistry and simple human empathy competing for our attention in every take. Breathtaking film-making of the highest quality.

I finally saw Life of Oharu at the Ontario Cinematheque in Toronto last night and what an amazing film it was.

I don't know why I held out on Mizoguchi for so long. I think it's because I watched a lot of Ozu in the day and expected more of the same heavily restrained, obliquely symbolic style which is often as alienating as it is inventive. I couldn't have been further off the mark. Mizoguchi's style is fluid and assured like Hitchcock and Bresson. He also injects a warmth of spirit and shows a genuine interest in storytelling which is often absent in much of Ozu's ouevre.

The Story of Oharu is a treatise on how women are economically exploited in a patriarchal society. This is probably one of the greatest 'women's films' ever made. It ranks above 'Breaking The Waves' and Sirk's 'Imitation of Life'. No small feat!! If you like stories that actually say something about the world in which we live, I would strongly recommend this film. It's a masterpiece of world cinema. I am definitely going to see more Mizoguchi.

As this film opens, Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka), a 50 year old prostitute, goes into a Buddhist temple and looks back at her life. We see that she was once loved, but because her young suitor (the great Toshiro Mifune) was of a lower caste, it was forbidden, resulting in her being banished and him being beheaded. As her family has been shamed, her father jumps on the chance to send her to a local Lord who is looking for a mistress who can be a surrogate mother. Unfortunately, she's abruptly dismissed after bearing him a son, and from there she steadily declines. The film was highly personal to director Kenji Mizoguchi since his own sister (who had raised him) was sold by their father to be a geisha, which is one of the things that happens to Oharu.

Like 'Ugetsu', the film Mizoguchi made the following year, 'The Life of Oharu' is a morality tale, and while it's less heavy-handed than 'Ugetsu', it is fairly melodramatic. The central message is one of Buddhist compassion, and not just for those who we know have had a sad, unfair life – but also those who appear derelict or decrepit to us, and who we might otherwise judge, not knowing what they've experienced. While there is depth to that message, and it's certainly nice seeing a film that empathizes with woman and the misogyny they endure, 'The Life of Oharu' is dark and hard to watch for 148 minutes. The plot is quite linear and we see her used and abused in every single societal role she plays: daughter, lover, concubine, courtesan, wife, nun, and common prostitute. I also don't think Tanaka was well utilized in this role – she simply doesn't look young enough in early scenes, or old enough in later scenes. The filmmaking is good and the film has a solid place in film history for its message, but it's too bleak, and too simplistically so, for a film of this length.

It was sickening to witness how Ohara was treated by the noble men of high rank and even by her father. She is a strong and proud woman, but she has a series of misfortunes of things she could not very well control herself. Because of her looks, her pride and her birth she is put, mostly by force, into various agreements that are disgrading and she meets little compassion.

That said, as this is based on a novel by Iharu Saikaku, it has strong tendencies towards being epic in approach. This is not a bad thing, but it takes on being a fairytale almost instead of gaining credibility like say 'Donzoko' by Kurosawa. For emotional impact Mizoguchi is an absolute master however and this tragic tale could not be outdone by any other.

Mizoguchi's films are capable, I think, of teaching life lessons without preaching or grandstanding. This film could cause a male chauvinist to join a consciousness-raising make sensitivity group. In a simple,understated way, the film outlines the tyrannies that made happiness almost impossible for women, not only in feudal Japan, but all over the world. It comments on the use of women's bodies as sex objects and baby-making machines, with no regard for women's minds or feelings. Notice, by the way, that Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka)is supposed to age from 18 to 50-and she really seems to age although makeup in the 1950s was not as advanced an art as it is now. The aging process is achieved through Tanaka's acting. And if she does not seem to us to be quite the ravaged old "witch" that one of her customers claims she is, then so much the better to let us know that she is being judged by an insensitive society.

a fifty-year old prostitute in Japan has to live in poverty, because no man is interested in her services. She visits a temple and one of the statues resembles the young Samurai, with whom her decline began. Being a noble's daughter she was not allowed to marry him, he was executed and she and her family were expelled from the court. Thereafter one misfortune follows the other. All of her attempts to lead an honest and happy life fail. The film is set in beautiful Japanese landscape and architecture, in which the action of the is arranged with great care. You can feel the inhuman rigor of feudal society and court etiquette. Nevertheless, the aesthetic quality if the films is slightly lower than those of Ozu's and Kurosawa's films. A highly recommendable movie though(8).

Although much of Kenji Mizoguchi's early work is now lost, the Japanese director is regarded as one of the country's finest thanks mainly to a handful of films made in the 1950s, many of which are considered masterpieces. The likes of Ugetsu Monogatari, Sansho the Bailiff and Street of Shame will no doubt be known to anyone with a keen interest in cinema, but none have the same lasting impression as The Life of Oharu, Mizoguchi's tale of one woman's plight in 1600's Japan. He was considered one of the first feminist directors, and much of his life was spent writing about their mistreatment at the hands of a matriarchal society rooted in class tradition. He was also known for frequenting brothels, but rather than paying for their services, Mizoguchi would instead listen to their stories. We meet Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) as a middle-aged prostitute, spending her nights by the city's gates begging or trying to sell her body to drunken wanderers.

She tells her friends how earlier that night an older man had brought her to a home full of young men, displaying her ageing face to the group as a way to convince them not to pay for prostitutes. They ask Oharu about her past, but she doesn't want to talk about it. Visiting a Buddhist temple, she notices that one of the statutes of Buddha bares a striking resemblance to her one and only love, a lowly retainer named Katsunosuke (Toshiro Mifune). Decades earlier, Oharu was a woman of high station, and shunned the advances of the young page simply because society wouldn't allow it. She could not resist true love however, and the two are eventually caught. While he is sent to the chopping block, Oharu's family are stripped of their status and forced to live out in the country. Her father (Ichiro Sugai) blames Oharu, but his attitude changes when she is chosen to produce the heir of Lord Matsudaira (Toshiaki Konoe). However, she is banished after giving birth to a boy to return to a family who will soon sell her into prostitution.

What transpires is a series of cruel punishments inflicted on our protagonist, and tragedy is born out of the fact that Oharu makes few of her own choices. There seems to be no place for true love in this society, something that still effects many countries today. A system seems to be in place that deflects the blame from the men who usher Oharu into these positions. She eventually serves as a maid, but loses her post when she is recognised from her days as a prostitute, and is even turned away from becoming a nun because of her 'sinful' past. The plot may sound like pure melodrama, but Mizoguchi is careful to avoid using broad strokes or losing focus of the larger picture. The camera is mostly still and precise, and also keeps its distance. Mizoguchi isn't interested in grand emotive close-ups - he wants you to see the whole picture as Oharu is shoved through her life like a puppet of little value. Most of us have gone through our lives making choices based on our core values, having the opportunity to stand up against anything that may threaten our moral code. The Life of Oharu is about a character completely stripped of this freedom, and her strength to bend rather than break. It's incredibly bleak stuff, but a masterpiece of measured character study.

Not even Lars von Trier can get to dramaturgy this depressing about a woman's decay of a life and horrendous bad luck. Yet Kenji Mizoguchi keeps things engrossing just because this character of Oharu is a smart, empathetic character, and the idea of a person having no real rights but only owners really is something that should go past simple feminist statements. at the same time I think, coming as it does in post war Japan in 1952, its the director via the book saying, look, don't take ANY freedoms for granted. not a shot is wasted here (even if one or two go just a bit longer than necessary, it's fine though, von Trier does worse).

And it all amounts to a moral plea, that even in the system of owners and property and where money is king (not queen), you still make choices to be decent or indecent, and that perceptions shouldn't be just taken at face value. If there is any big lesson to take away it's that so much horror that can befall a good person is someone's first impression and lack of critical thinking. Indeed, it's shot with an uncanny ability to focus on major points in seemingly small moments- when the one man is looking about at all the Kyoto girls and none fit his strict standards for his master's breeding needs, the shot tracks along as he is looking at them all slowly, and it ends with the shot showing all the girls looking at the man like 'what did we do wrong?' But the performances are all strong (if, yeah, melodramatic as hell at times, it is Japanese neo-realism to an extent).

And of course the inimitable Toshiro Mifune steals his precious scenes and helps to add to the initial trauma for Oharu- when you lose a man like that, it's all downhill from there perhaps.

Long before the "Me too" movement Kenji Mizoguchi had a keen eye for the weak position of women in society. In reverse chronological order his film "Street of shame" (1956) is about modern post Second World War prostitution in Japan. "A Geisha" (1953) is about the transition of the Geisha system to modern prostitution. "The life of O-Haru" (1952), situated in the Middle Ages, shows that also the Geisha system was not very girl friendly.

"The story in "The life of O-Haru" is very melodramatic. It is hard to imagine that a woman has so much misfortune in only one lifetime. It reminded me of the melodramas of Douglas Sirk of (also) the 50's. Sirk and "The life of O-Haru" have in common that under the surface of the melodrama there is genuine critique on the hypocrisy in society. In "The life of O-Haru" many men consider O-Haru a very immoral woman, not having the slightest idea that the real immorality is on their side.

When comparing the episode in the house of Lord Matsudaira from "The life of O-Haru" with "Raise the red lantern" (1991, Zhang Yimou), we see a curious difference in the roles of the first wife / mistress and the concubine respectively. In "Raise the red lantern" there was already a son / heir and the role of the concubine was to satisfy the sexual needs of the master. In "The life of O-Haru" the role of the concubine is to produce a son / heir. When she has delivered, she is sent home because she arouses the master so much that it is bad for his health.

Pressure to produce a heir is not exclusie for Asian cultures. Look for example at "The private life of Henry VIII" (1938, Alexander Korda). Henry VIII did punish the wives who did not deliver, the court of Lord Matsudaira even punsihes the concubines who do deliver.

Deeply tragic and sad tale that is nevertheless presented to us with great dignity and style. A tale of the harshness of feudal Japan and the way the men treat the women is unfortunately not without its echo, even today in that great country. A woman here, originally of noble beginnings, makes bad, then good, then more and more bad and none of it of her making. She is simply the result in men's dealings and hypocrisies. Still beautiful to look at though with the magical camera-work and immaculate direction. Some slight confusions at first until we realise that time jumps at the blink of an eye and before we know it one period has slid effortlessly into another, where inevitably another tragedy awaits our fallen heroine.

Few time periods or cultures are as heavily romanticized as feudal Japan, as true in Japanese cinema as in the fiction of other regions. Relatively few are those filmmakers who explore jidaigeki with a mind for criticizing that distant society, and in turn those that would in any fashion mirror its horribly rigid, oppressive values. Kobayashi Masaki was certainly one, exemplified in his essential classics 'Harakiri' and 'Samurai rebellion,' and esteemed Mizoguchi Kenji is definitely another. We saw this in 1954's 'Sansho the bailiff,' terribly depressing as it was, and in 'The crucified lovers' the same year. While the nature of the material rather precludes the use of terms like "pleasure" or "enjoyable," 1952's 'The life of Oharu' is very much kith and kin with the latter works. In tracing the many hardships of the titular character, the picture speaks directly to the extremely low status of women in the Edo period, little more than cheap and disposable property; to the inflexible hierarchical and patriarchal structure of society, and the absolute power wielded by anyone of authority; and to the total lack of freedom and personal agency afforded to anyone except the most powerful, lest they run afoul of the incredibly unequal dynamics of the culture. Under such circumstances, any title that doesn't specifically deal with only the nobility, their retainers, or ronin is all but guaranteed to make for an arduous viewing experience. And so it is.

Yet difficult as the subject matter is - further including prejudice, social stigma, and the evils of money in the world - the unflinching treatment is exactly what makes this so compelling. And master filmmaker that Mizoguchi was, we are in the very best hands for ' The life of Oharu' to be rendered with all due meaning and import. In adapting segments of Ihara Saikaku's novel for the screen with co-writer Yoda Yoshikata, Mizoguchi has shaped a feature that flows smoothly in its narrative progression from one bad turn after another for our beleaguered protagonist. Oharu's only "crime" has ever been thinking for herself, or to some degree standing up for herself, and misfortune upon misfortune subsequently piles atop the consequences of the unyielding culture and the abject refusal of most anyone Oharu meets to regard her with reason, compassion, or empathy. The narrative is actively distressing, frankly, but equally engaging, absorbing, and satisfying. Strong scene writing and vivid characterizations are adjoined by fruitful dialogue that further brings the sorry tableau to bear; while Mizoguchi sustains a plain, muted tone with his direction, this allows the strength of the storytelling to speak entirely for itself. That strength unquestionably includes the acting as much as the writing, for from one to the next the actors summon admirable, poignant emotional depth with their performances of nuanced range and physicality. Tanaka Kinuyo may stand out most given her lead role, but the rest of the cast is truly just as excellent.

As one very well anticipates of any like fare, the movie is splendidly well made in every other regard, meeting all the high standards of its brethren. The production design and art direction are top notch, boasting much fine detail, and the costume design, hair, and makeup are quite sharp. Hirano Yoshimi's cinematography is crisp, vivid, and smart, visualizing the proceedings with stark clarity and while lending to the verisimilitude of a big world in which Oharu feels so very small. This is beautifully shot, really, conferring a sense of artistry to the film beyond the gloomy potency of the storytelling. The result of all this is that a runtime of over two hours passes surprisingly quickly and smoothly as the saga so completely draws us in. It's not an easy watch, not least as it bears infuriating relevance to real life; as also seen in Kobayashi's 'Inn of evil,' this goes further still as it reflects the profound injustices wrought by societal conditions, which society then willfully ignores while castigating its victims. No, not an easy watch - but also unfailingly solid, a masterpiece from one of the most highly regarded filmmakers in Japanese cinema. One might say that it's not as outwardly striking as some of its contemporaries, but at that point the discussion is one of semantics more than substance. I sat to watch with high expectations, and I have not been disappointed. One should be well aware of the grim tenor on hand before committing to it, but provided this itself is no obstacle, 'The life of Oharu' is a stupendous, deeply engrossing classic, and I can only give it my very highest recommendation.