The Life of Oharu (1952)

 Kenji Mizoguchi's "The Life of Oharu"


After watching Kenji Mizoguchi's 1952 film "The Life of Oharu," I felt as though it was the thematic pinnacle of Mizoguchi's career (up until 1952). Mizoguchi certainly had a theme and subject matter that he stringently adhered to throughout his long filmmaking career. That being stories revolving around women and the struggles of women in Japan, more specifically. I felt as though that with "The Life of Oharu," he was effectively able to construct a film that crystalized his entire body of work into a single, coherent piece. Aside from my own personal perspective, the film helped revitalize Mizoguchi's career from a global perspective. 

"The Life of Oharu" centers on a late 17th century woman named Oharu, the daughter of a noble samurai. After falling in love and sleeping with a 'lower status" man, Oharu and her family are exiled from Kyoto. After becoming a concubine to a king and bearing his son, she is once again discarded. Her father then sells her into prostitution, where the social mark left from it never leaves her. Her reputation grants her nothing but cruelty and disdain from everyone she comes into contact with.

Watching Oharu continuously met with cruelty despite doing nothing on her part save being a woman is an excruciating experience. Due to the power and social carte blanche that all the men around her hold, Oharu becomes nothing more than a social slave, a utility to use and dispose of. It becomes evident watching the film that women are nothing more than a social currency in the social and economic system in this 17th century Japanese environment. 

What really hits home for me is the almost 2 and a half hour runtime. Mizoguchi is known for having very long films, but the subject matter of this particular film with its allotted runtime really forces the viewer to sit through the experience and feel every second of the misery. It's like constantly getting beaten down with no end in sight. It's a gruel to watch a woman dragged through the mud of life with no sense of respite and no end in sight.

Because "The Life of Oharu" is so expansive, it feels like Mizoguchi's most ambitious film of his career, perhaps only behind his 1939 masterwork, "The Story of the Last Chrysantheum." By the time he released "Oharu" in 1952, he had been making films in Japan for 15 years. However, it was "Oharu" that was able to get Mizoguchi global recognition for the first time. It certainly didn't hurt that Japan was experiencing a Renaissance in the 1950s.


 

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