Osaka Elegy (1936) has a plot one might expect from pre-code Hollywood: a young woman whose family faces economic troubles agrees to become the mistress of her boss to support them. Yet even pre-code Hollywood, as cynical as it could be, would likely never have turned out something as bleak and gritty as Osaka Elegy.Mizoguchi keeps the camera at a distance from the characters; we rarely get close-ups. And yet the movie is not cold or detached; indeed, it is a compassionate film in its examination of the double standard and the way women were treated in Japanese society at the time. The performances are all good, but the biggest revelation for me was Isuzu Yamada as the tortured heroine Ayako.Having only been familiar with her villainous role in Akira Kurosawa's Noh-influenced version of Macbeth, Throne of Blood, I was surprised by her more modern characters in Osaka Elegy and its successor, Sisters of the Gion. Her performance teems with barely repressed emotion and desperate optimism. She was so moving. That final close-up shot of her face is up there with Garbo's blank visage at the end of Queen Christina or, as another reviewer mentioned, Jean Pierre Leaud's at the finale of The 400 Blows.A classic, and I don't use that word lightly: this film may be 80 plus years old, but its message is still relevant, its images still move.

Ayako (Isuzu Yamada) becomes the mistress of her boss, Mr. Asai, so she can pay her father's debt, and prevent him from going to prison for embezzlement. She also sends money to her brother Hiroshi to pay his university tuition, but her father intercepts it.Mizoguchi considered the film his first serious effort as a director, and while I am not familiar with his earlier work, I have to say this is the kind of film that leaves a mark. Either Mizoguchi or his cinematographer had an excellent awareness of the camera -- the door closing to block the camera early on in the film -- years ahead of its time.The subject matter in general is impressive. I am not sure what the typical morality was in pre-war Japan, but to feature adultery and whatnot in the 1930s seems quite bold.

I believe the challenge here was to conceive of a film in terms of bunraku - the traditional Japanese puppet theater - and extrapolate from the environment a structure, so one stage where heightened drama unfolds, controlled, with a view of the mechanisms handling the illusion, and then a second stage on the side to supply a rotation of music and voice expressing emotion. This is very well thought out, something to keep in mind when viewing later Mizoguchi where melodrama lacks annotation.This translates in our film as melodrama about a bold young woman who gambles away on her dignity and reputation because the world around her is desperate for either money or sex, the controlling mechanism is that only the viewer is in possession of all the facts and so is able to read tragic fate in every exchange. This has been noted by some viewers as film noir, because the woman appears to function as a femme fatale, but the Japanese have no affinity for this sort of trope.So of course, in accordance with bunraku, the woman is a puppeteer but also herself a puppet, a figure on the same stage as the play she enacts, her movements subject to our scrutiny. You will note this in tandem with, and reversing, an earlier Mizoguchi - The Water Magician - about a water artist whose life is merged with the transitory flows she used to control.This is beautifully rendered in a scene where she is caught with her boss on a night out to watch a bunraku play. She has set a plot in motion, attempting control, an active role, but unpredictable life foils her. The wife demands explanations but seems the most irate for noticing the hairstyle on the girl, signifying a married woman, her role on the stage being supplanted even though it's a loveless marriage and thankless role. Moments before, however, we have seen an excerpt from the play, where inside the artifice, the controlled fiction, it was the suspicious husband accusing the woman of adultery.This would have an ordinary ironic effect if mapped cleanly to the situation outside the stage, but it doesn't, it's wholly asymmetrical, the tension all in the imbalance of familiar elements framed askew. You have to puzzle about assigning to the players the puppet-master's controls. This is the touch lacking in Ozu's Floating Weeds.The music is not in the emotional after-effects of storytelling, this too part of the heightened artifice. The music is in the camera, caressing day from night.

This is the first collaboration between Mizoguchi and writer Yoshikata Yoda, with the actress Isuzu Yamada in the principal role, as a young telephonist pushed to prostitution to save her ruined family, and then repudiated by them. Mizoguchi begins his impressive mastership with the framing and the perspective and, though still far from his masterpieces, is an interesting milestone for the Mizoguchi admirers.