The man who understood women
As symphony halls have their classic warhorses, so do movie-revival screens have their foolproof auteurs of post-World War II world cinema. Bergman is their Beethoven, Fellini their Mozart, Truffaut their beloved Brahms, and who can blame them when audiences remain steady even in an era of Criterion DVD?
The Brattle's recent festival devoted to the Janus Collection was pure comfort food to a certain segment of enlightened Boston moviegoers -- certainly more so than the austere macrobiotic fare of, say, Béla Tarr and other rigorous new filmmakers, and much more preferable than the junk food clogging multiplex arteries.
So the Museum of Fine Arts can't be faulted for its "Classic Films by Kenji Mizoguchi " series, even if one wishes it dipped deeper into the Japanese master's filmography. The series is made up of seven films, screening from tomorrow through Jan. 14, each of them key to understanding this most Japanese of Japanese filmmakers.
Where Akira Kurosawa filmed action and emotion through Hollywood filters and the great Yasujiro Ozu rained humanism on everything he touched, Mizoguchi -- the third of classic Japanese cinema's "big three" -- used historic epochs and neighborhood locales as settings for his eternal subject: the agony and ecstasy of womanhood.
Mostly agony, though, and a sense of getting the short end of the stick in a patriarchal world. A Mizoguchi film is often an essay in tough, lyrical proto-feminism, all the more striking for being set in the "floating world" of geishas and prostitutes. (The young Mizoguchi, raised in a family of lost wealth and status, saw his sister become a geisha -- by all accounts a turning point in his life.) A simple viewing of "Sisters of the Gion " is probably the best corrective there is to the sumptuous half-truths of "Memoirs of a Geisha."
"Sisters," made in 1936 and the earliest work in the MFA overview, is often considered the finest film of the Japanese prewar era. Certainly it's the most heartbreakingly observant, a tale of two geishas who cope with men in radically different ways. The older, Umekichi (Yoko Umemura ), is the traditionalist and romantic; the younger, Omocha (Isuzu Yamada), the Westernized cynic. Both women get burned, and Omocha's cry of despair at the end is as rattling to one's complacency today as it must have been to 1936 Japanese audiences.
"The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum" (1939) is set, as many Mizoguchi films are, in an artistic milieu. The talentless scion (Shotaro Hanayagi ) of a family of Kabuki actors is transformed over the years by the love of a servant girl (Kokichi Takada ); it's an unapologetically melodramatic story that suggests a Douglas Sirk weepie with Von Sternberg production design and long Renoir-esque camera takes that pin the characters to the screen like images on an unfurling scroll. (Mizoguchi said that he wanted his films to seem more like hand-scrolls, and he worked toward an ideal of "one scene/one take" that put him at the opposite end of the spectrum from heavy cutters like Kurosawa.)
There's another astonishing long take at the end of "Utamaro and His Five Women" (1946), one of the series' lesser-known gems. Ostensibly about the 18th-century woodblock artist Utamaro (Minosuke Bando ), it's really about the volcanic female emotions that swirl around him, most notably in the person of Okita (Kinuyo Tanaka ), a geisha whose passions overtake her. The artist here is an obvious stand-in for Mizoguchi himself, distanced but enraptured. If you've ever fallen in love with a Japanese print, see this movie.
With 1952's "Life of Oharu, " the series enters the era of Mizoguchi's late masterpieces. Perhaps the most tragic and unforgiving of his depictions of female sacrifice, "Oharu" is nevertheless effortlessly watchable, the director finding a Shakespearean beauty in womanly resilience. The star again is Tanaka, who appeared in 15 Mizoguchi films and increasingly became his pliant, suffering muse.
"Ugetsu" (1953), a ghost story told against the backdrop of medieval warfare, is the film that brought Mizoguchi to the attention of the West : It won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, was nominated for an Oscar for best costumes, and remains a staple on lists of the best movies of all times. It's the most balanced of his late films, with a serene insistence that men dream and women suffer the consequences.
"Sansho the Bailiff" (1954) is a more focused epic, about a brother (Yoshiaki Hanayagi ) and sister (Kyoko Kagawa ) enduring hardships in 11th-century Japan; again, the camerawork seems to possess a godlike wisdom in its unobtrusive observance of fate and tenacity. Where Ozu at this stage was finding the grace in bourgeoise lives and Kurosawa was storming the barricades of genre, Mizoguchi was connecting women's weepies to something larger and more universal.
"Street of Shame" (1956) was Mizoguchi's last film before his death from leukemia at 58 ; it's also his most atypically direct, a scalding story of prostitutes in post war Tokyo and the government's attempts to ban them. It's a throwback to the social realism of the director's 1930s work with touches of '50s extremism, and its sympathies are squarely with the working women.
"Street" represents not a career summation but a possible new direction cut short, and it pointed the way toward more extreme depictions of prostitution in Japanese society like "Gate of Flesh " (1964) from the mad-dog director Seijun Suzuki .
There's a double bill for you: Mizoguchi paired with one of his stylistic and socially conscious heirs. By contrast, the MFA is giving us the straight-up deal -- seven films by a director who deserves encountering and re-encountering throughout one's moviegoing life -- and attendance is all that's required.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog. 
