Utamaro and His Five Women

A couple of weeks back, I finally got hold of a copy of Kenji Mizoguchi's 'Utamaro o Meguro Gonin no Onna' (Utamaro and His Five Women), released in 1946, and took the opportunity to watch it this weekend. It's not available on DVD in the UK, so my slightly battered copy, which I searched high and low for, is an ex-rental video from the States. I approached the film not as a movie buff (because I'm definitely not one) but as an art lover, and found the treatment of the relationship between artist and subject to be quite interesting. The story is one of obsession and passion; for Utamaro art is the focus of both, whilst for the five women connected to him it is romantic attachment which takes centre stage. Utamaro is depicted as a man obsessed with women, but not primarily as objects of sexual desire, as his only real connection with these women is through their depiction. He is consumed by art, as the woman are consumed by love. The strong characters in the film are the five women, whilst the men depicted are fairly weak; victims of their desire for the women in their lives or, as in Utamaro's case, their work.
The women fall into five specific female 'types' in the same manner that the females depicted in Utamaro's prints were grouped according to their characteristics. There is the refined courtesan Tagasode of the Daimonjiya brothel, upon whose back Utamaro paints a picture of Yamauba and Kintarô in one of the films most well-known scenes, and the passionate and wilful waitress Okita of the Naniwaya teahouse. There is Yukie, the faithful and respectable daughter of an artist of the Kanô school; Oran, the naive daughter of a commoner; and the plain but good natured Oshin. The character of Okita is particularly interesting, and I found the storyline to be especially entertaining (and highly inventive) considering the fact that the chapter in my book, Utamaro Revealed, that deals with her, and other young girls like her who worked as serving girls in the teashops of Edo, is called 'The Beauty of Innocence' (once you see the film you'll understand what I mean here). For anyone who knows something of Utamaro's biographical details, this film does not attempt to portray the events of the artist's life accurately... having Tsutaya alive following Utamaro's hand-cuffing, when in reality he was dead seven years before the artist's censorship. It does, however, bring alive the artist's environment and, regardless of the fanciful nature of the Okita storyline, present the men and women who Utamaro associated with in a very three dimensional manner. As I am, and have always been, immensely interested in the subjects depicted in Utamaro's prints, I found this bringing to life of the characters we are used to encountering only in two dimensional representations to be extremely captivating.