The Straits of Love and Hate (1937) User Reviews

Tongue-in-cheek melodrama by Mizoguchi

[chaos-rampant · 11 June 2012]

Mizoguchi adapting Tolstoy, apparently. Don't be fooled for a moment though, this is far more sophisticated than what initially appears as another 'weepy'.

In The Water Magician from 1933, Mizoguchi had shown enthusiasm to experiment - and largely excel - in the radical French mode from the 20's, dissolves, layers, supers, the modern eye in motion. This mode favored silent filmmaking, since a hazy, dreamlike affect was the whole story. But sound rolled in and audiences were clearly eager for more realism, if we judge by how quickly the devices were abandoned.

So Mizoguchi seems to have spent the rest of the decade puzzling next to other things about new ways to deliver a narrative.

The exercise here is three different ways to deliver a set of characters, each one annotating the ones before.

The first of these is a quietly suffering country-girl pregnant with child and stranded in Tokyo by the selfish, cowardly father who packs up and leaves for the safety of his parents' business. This is a typical pair, especially for Mizoguchi. We expect ordinary melodrama about a callous world that destroys innocence, the type of film coming from Japan that was going to be a sensation in European festivals 15 years down the road.

Overwrought tragedy played straight is the least of Oharu's strengths in my view, thankfully it's not what we have here. Look what he does.

The second set is the same girl and a stranger who stepped in to comfort her that night. He has been in and out of prison, the child has been born and given to foster parents. But now the girl is markedly different than when we first met her. She's a hostess in a bar, seen partying and flirting semi-drunk with a client. She's not the fragile, distraught being we were led to believe. The change is so jarring it may seem contrived, which is also a point here and commented on, but the trick is on us; we only knew this girl for a few minutes of screen time and thought we knew her, in fact thought we knew her so well we had the story all worked out in our head. The boring answer is that she was indeed pure and only corrupted by the city.

This segment ends with the couple running off to join an acting troupe and staging a play back in her hometown. The play is a comedy that incidentally lampoons her situation, young mother alone with her child, cradling a sackcloth for a baby. Isn't this a clever turn-around? Everything we were prepared to open up to in earnest is made light of - and as part of a stageshow before an audience.

The last part is where, following the show, the baby's father is contrite and rushes backstage to assume responsibility. The girl confronts him coldly. They have several back-and-forths, but now both characters come off as more rounded, more mature, not the simple cutouts we had so far. Why this effect is achieved, is precisely because we have knowledge of their previous selves. Contrast is everything, building on context.

The finale is that the man cannot to the end break the controlling grip of his father, now it's his turn to be abandoned to a karma he has chosen for himself. The girl takes off again with her true love.

The parting image is of them again as actors on a stage, with the man teasingly insisting to the audience that they are 'real people' and everything that came before is proof of that, the whole plot just seen. So we have typical melodrama at the bottom, then characters changing into costumes and all of it fully bound to a comedy being staged about it.

Pretty cool, eh?

excellent Japanes classic

[cynthiahost · 10/10 · 29 August 2013]

I saw the film and the print was rather poor.Japan was slow in coming into the talkie and this is one of Japans early talkies.When I saw how the cameras were static and they weren't much close up,I though they were both the old sound .Its funny when you see the country girl talking to the musician who saved her from a pimp,that, he was a musician,plays an accordion,But he now unemployed cause of the talkies.As i said the talkies were late coming in Japan,even though the lee D.Forrest process was used for music and sound effects in a 1926 silent feature.the plot is that a son of a country hotel has finished graduating from college,but, want to move to the city.His parents disapprove ,they want him to stay and help manage the hotel.His girl ,who's pregnant,want to go with him ,but, he doe snot have enough money for that.If she stays she be sold to a Bordello,I think that what the situation was.So he agree that she can go with her .But as soon as they reach Tokyo ,he can't find a job and s he has given up,they both owe rent .She's pregnant .He ends up leaving her .She find a job as a waitress and she also has a new male friend the unemployed musician.But after a mishap,when a drunken client take off without paying for the party he invited her and the other girls and her male friend.The musician ends up s giving his accordion as the price for the food .She has already send he child to be taken care of ,but, she has to send money . After being in the streets ,the unemployed musician meets his father who's a stage impresario for an acting troupe and hire both the girl and his son.For stand up comedy ,which is successful.the thin is that it take palace in 1937 and japan is not fully western clothes yet.there are still no cars.At least they don't show any.Well the baby is given back to her,no she can take care of it.Though is so successful and now they go back to her home.Her ex fiancé want to take responsibility to for the child .She says no.She goes back to her new love and their success in show business.In real life Japan was a little more modern than what was being showed,at least until Hirohito decide to join Hitler 8/30/13

Hidden treasure on the struggles of a young woman

[johndavies007 · 10/10 · 26 April 2016]

Made at the Shinko Kinema studios, Straits of Love and Hate/Aien Kyo (1937) was based partly on a work by Kawaguchi Matsutaro, a Shinpa tragedy writer and performer. It also encorporates Tolstoy's Resurrection, a much read book in Japan, and was scripted by Yoda Yoshikata, who was to become Mizoguchi's regular scriptwriter, here working on his third Mizoguchi film.

Rarely seen, the film is in need of restoration. With very sparing use of close-ups and quite dark settings with indistinct figures it can be sometimes hard to follow. The viewer has to work, but careful attention is well rewarded! As other Mizoguchi films from that time have been lost, we are lucky to have it at all.

As often in Mizoguchi's career we have a tale with elements of Shinpa melodrama. Ofumi, a servant at an inn in the Northern province of Shinsu, is impregnated by the inn-keeper's son Kenkichi (Shimizu Masao) with whom she is temporarily infatuated and forced to elope in the face of family, especially paternal, disapproval. Kenkichi, however, proves to be a hopeless breadwinner, and Ofumi is forced into prostitution to care for the new baby. Kenkichi lacks the character to stand up to his father who visits, and returns home.

After a period as a waitress and turning to drink, while using a wet nurse to care for the baby, Ofumi joins a troupe of comic Manzai travelling players in which she strikes up a relationship with fellow performer Yoshitaro (Kawazu Seizaburo)….

Aien Kyo continues Mizoguchi's interest in theatre. And as elsewhere (e.g Story of the Late Chrysanthemums) the theatrical performance bears relation to and comments on offstage events- later in the film, the watching Kenkichi is filled with remorse. His voyeuristic peeping is a common feature of Mizoguchi films, here reminding me of the final shot of both Street of Shame and Mizoguchi's career.

I admire the daring formal devices, which to me more than compensate for any loss of close physical association with the characters. At times, we are placed almost as documentary fly on the wall observers looking past people in the foreground and characters with their backs turned.

I'm also very taken with the smooth camera movement, the beauty of compositions, the lovely wintry settings, and not only the film's sounds but also quieter moments, creating an atmosphere that is natural and yet distinctive.

Following on from Mizoguchi's experiments in deep staging in Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion the previous year, Aien Kyo makes remarkable use of different planes of interest, with comings and goings in foreground and deep background- for example, in the scene in which Kenkichi is conversing with the troupe manager, they leave and the distance reveals a further room from which Ofumi and Yoshitaro emerge.

There are beautiful moments of stillness, wisps of steam reminiscent of Ozu and the more recent masterpiece Maborosi in which, like Straits of Love and Hate, close ups are few and so all the more precious. At the time of making the film, Mizoguchi disliked close-ups but later appreciated their value more.

Yamaji Fumiko gives a very striking and convincing performance, her first for Mizoguchi, as Ofumi. Shindo Kaneto, a young Art design assistant on the film, went on to a very long career in directing, most notably Onibaba and Naked Island. He was so impressed with Mizoguchi's work and transformation of the actress he became what has been called a disciple of Mizoguchi and later made a film about the great man.

Whereas Kenkichi is a typical weak and vacillating Mizoguchian male (others, especially fathers, are often oppressive), Ofumi has spark; by the time she meets up with him later in the film, toughened by her experiences of hardship, she can call the shots. At one point, he is remorsefully and haplessly kept waiting for her reply as she calmly taps her cigarette before smoking. Mizoguchi heroines are certainly not all shrinking violets or self-sacrificing angels, but often strong, resilient and here, as in The Love of Sumako the Actress, My Love has been Burning and the memorable ending of Osaka Elegy, also spirited and independent.

Kenkichi however comes across as quite an anaemic character- maybe a weakness of the film, as with one or two others by Mizoguchi, is this relative lack of colour to the central performance as a feeble and unreliable male.

Yoshitaru is a stronger and more grounded personality. His attack on Kenkichi is apparently not the result of vulgar jealousy but selflessly encouraging Ofumi to return to the father of her child, and likely security. But it turns out the respective weakness and faults of Kenkichi and his snobbish domineering father have not been dispelled.

In Tolstoy's Resurrection the male central character, whose initial impetuosity causes difficulties for a young woman, has a greater nobility than Kenkichi. Mizoguchi had a less rosy outlook on the potential ideal humanism of the upper and richer classes. Here, the film's ending i think strikes some sort of balance between regret over lost possibilities and an undaunted front in the face of a testing future. We are left with faith in the heroine.

Rarest Of Surviving Mizoguchis

[lchadbou-326-26592 · 26 September 2013]

Up until recently,to see Aien Kyo as it's known in Japanese, since it did not circulate in the occasional travelling series devoted to the great Kenji Mizoguchi,one had to go to Japan to look at it in a collection. Thanks however to a network of DVD fansubbers, one can now catch this rarest of the director's surviving films with less difficulty, even if the existing copy is somewhat dark and fails to show his pictorial richness at its best. The story starts (with jazz under the credits alerting us that we're in the modern era)in Shinshu, a resort in the snowy mountains. Kenkichi, a graduate, doesn't want to stay to work in the lodge his parents run, and plans to go to Tokyo. His girlfriend Ohumi, a maid there, is pregnant but (money issues often coming to the fore in a Mizoguchi drama)he can't afford to take her. He relents when her uncle Murakami, whom she feels threatened by, appears. In the city they stay with Mr and Mrs Hirose, their hosts need money too (it is the Depression) but Kenkichi hasn't been looking for work, we see him lying in bed reading. Typical for Mizoguchi, she's the one who goes out, and soon a fight develops at night over her between two men, one a pimp. The other, Yoshitaro, who has a somewhat dubious reputation as well, lives in their building and gets her a job in a milk bar.(The place has an amusing English sign: Light Lunch Soft Drink). Meanwhile Kenkichi's father comes to visit and when she returns she realizes he's gone back to his family and has dumped her. A detective comes after Yoshitaro, who had used a knife in that fight. Yoshi as they also call him offers to help her later. Ohumi visits a midwife and arranges to give up her child, a boy who she wants named Kentaro. We see her with the new foster parents in an unappealing industrial landscape with smokestacks by a river. In the next scene Yoshi is on the accordion, playing in a restaurant as the camera follows him in a characteristic flowing Mizoguchi shot, We get to hear a bit of his "Parlez Moi D'Amour." A woman recognizes him.It's Ohumi, she seems different, cheaper, we learn from the dialog it's been two years, she's needed money, and is with an older man. They go to another place, but the old man ditches them and leaves them to pay the bill. After this we see her, with Yoshi lying on a park bench, they've taken his accordion as payment. They run into her uncle Murakami, the one she ran away from before, who is now more of a help and after tempura (a treat) he hires them as entertainers, brings her the boy, and takes them on the road as a travelling troupe. A scene follows with chorus girls onstage dancing to another Western tune, "My Blue Heaven." The camera moves through the murky backstage area. The troupe, we soon learn, is called Blue Sky Entertainment, and they have a struggle making a success. On a train when they're going ironically to her home town, the boy is sick, it is winter. Yoshi and Oshumi though make a good team when we see them onstage, singing and clowning, she even makes light of her previous predicament. Kenkichi is in the audience (at one moment we get his point of view of the stage) and after being uncomfortable and embarrassed goes out and meets with her uncle. Mizoguchi has composed a number of shots so far in depth, with one or more characters in the foreground, one or more in midshot, and often more characters in the background. In a long take in the eating place adjoining the theater, we see Yoshi and Oshumi enter the scene from screens in the back, only to find Kenkichi, Murakami and the boy, who were in the front of the image, have left for Kenkichi's hotel.She comes to retrieve the boy, Kenkichi is sorry she's become hardhearted and she is cold to him as she hangs up laundry in the yard. She now loves Yoshi, even though at first he didn't seem sexually interested in her. The camera follows the two men as they get into a fight, Yoshi taking out his knife again. In the next scene we are by the sea, the boy has a toy, and Kenkichi visits, then his parents. The idea is to give the child a better home with the grandparents, but Kenkichi's prejudiced father refuses. A dissolve leads us to the final shot, of Yoshi and Ohumi carrying on with their entertainment. This interesting entry in Mizoguchi's cycle of melodramas about suffering women and also about performance, is according to the credits based on my mother's favorite novel, Resurrection, but as one can tell from the synopsis I've just given, it's a loose adaptation.

Mizoguchi version of "Resurrection."

[Mozjoukine · 31 December 2011]

The Tolstoi novel, already filmed in Japan as KARUSHA in 1914, is a distant progenitor of this contemporary account.

Typical Mizoguchi weepy. The inn maid finds her affair with the manager is opposed by his parents. Separated, the girl is forced to give up her child but later, with her entertainer partner, retrieves it and returns to the snow bound inn.

The film making is sophisticated, particularly for the mid thirties, with the influence of the German Street Films evident. Strong imagery, composition in depth, long trackings, atmospheric interiors intercut with location shooting, where distant factory chimneys belch smoke.

Every so often direction tries too hard. This is not comparable to the fifties costume film trio.

A good copy of the Black and white original must have been impressive.