• 武蔵野婦人 (The Lady of Musashino)

3/30/19 (Sat), Tokyo

A 1951 film by Mizoguchi Kenji about the deterioration of Japanese values after the war and the misguided attempts of a woman from a respected family to preserve them. Michiko and her slimy husband have returned to her family home in Musashino after their Tokyo home is bombed out. (Musashino, which has long since been absorbed by the capital city, was apparently an idyllic rural territory back then.) The husband, whose evident success in avoiding the draft is unexplained, is a university professor besotted with French literature, openly supportive of adultery and uninterested in Japan’s fate during the war. Michiko’s cousin Ono is equally grubby, a weapons maker who has become rich from the war. This arouses the disgust of Michiko’s father, who is protective of the family’s heritage (he asks the son-in-law at one point if he actually wants Japan to lose). Meanwhile, Ono’s wife is openly unhappy with her marriage and shows a willingness to stray, leaning on Michiko as well in her own less-than-satisfactory marriage.

The real trouble for Michiko begins when another cousin, Tsutomu, returns from the war unharmed but with little care as to what he drinks or who he sleeps with. Gradually he falls in love with Michiko – and the feeling is mutual. Nevertheless, Michiko ultimately suppresses her own needs for the sake of principle, even when her husband betrays her by running off with Ono’s wife and stealing a document that will cheat her of her inheritance. Her determination to remain pure leads her to drastic action, rather disturbing in the wake of a war that involved just such blind devotion to some higher “duty” regardless of the personal consequences.

Tanaka Kinuyo is incapable of giving a bad performance, but her character here is a melodramatic mess. Mizoguchi is predictably taking the side of the female character, but I’m not sure he knows what he wants to say. He picked up quickly – four of his following five films were among the best movies ever made, with the very next being The Life of Oharu – but that’s no excuse for the muddled theme here.