While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Although much of Kenji Mizoguchi's early work is now lost, the Japanese director is regarded as one of the country's finest thanks mainly to a handful of films made in the 1950s, many of which are considered masterpieces. The likes of Ugetsu Monogatari, Sansho the Bailiff and Street of Shame will no doubt be known to anyone with a keen interest in cinema, but none have the same lasting impression as The Life of Oharu, Mizoguchi's tale of one woman's plight in 1600's Japan. He was considered one of the first feminist directors, and much of his life was spent writing about their mistreatment at the hands of a matriarchal society rooted in class tradition. He was also known for frequenting brothels, but rather than paying for their services, Mizoguchi would instead listen to their stories. We meet Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka) as a middle-aged prostitute, spending her nights by the city's gates begging or trying to sell her body to drunken wanderers.She tells her friends how earlier that night an older man had brought her to a home full of young men, displaying her ageing face to the group as a way to convince them not to pay for prostitutes. They ask Oharu about her past, but she doesn't want to talk about it. Visiting a Buddhist temple, she notices that one of the statutes of Buddha bares a striking resemblance to her one and only love, a lowly retainer named Katsunosuke (Toshiro Mifune). Decades earlier, Oharu was a woman of high station, and shunned the advances of the young page simply because society wouldn't allow it. She could not resist true love however, and the two are eventually caught. While he is sent to the chopping block, Oharu's family are stripped of their status and forced to live out in the country. Her father (Ichiro Sugai) blames Oharu, but his attitude changes when she is chosen to produce the heir of Lord Matsudaira (Toshiaki Konoe). However, she is banished after giving birth to a boy to return to a family who will soon sell her into prostitution.What transpires is a series of cruel punishments inflicted on our protagonist, and tragedy is born out of the fact that Oharu makes few of her own choices. There seems to be no place for true love in this society, something that still effects many countries today. A system seems to be in place that deflects the blame from the men who usher Oharu into these positions. She eventually serves as a maid, but loses her post when she is recognised from her days as a prostitute, and is even turned away from becoming a nun because of her 'sinful' past. The plot may sound like pure melodrama, but Mizoguchi is careful to avoid using broad strokes or losing focus of the larger picture. The camera is mostly still and precise, and also keeps its distance. Mizoguchi isn't interested in grand emotive close-ups - he wants you to see the whole picture as Oharu is shoved through her life like a puppet of little value. Most of us have gone through our lives making choices based on our core values, having the opportunity to stand up against anything that may threaten our moral code. The Life of Oharu is about a character completely stripped of this freedom, and her strength to bend rather than break. It's incredibly bleak stuff, but a masterpiece of measured character study.

The tale of a 17th century samurai's daughter.This film is known for its long takes and notoriously was filmed with no sound stage -- the cast and crew were working largely within a warehouse. They made it work, apparently, as the sound is as close to perfect as one could want.I love the theme of the samurai in Japanese films. Of course, no other country could tackle it, but I am surprised how many Japanese directors have returned to this part of their culture. And it always works.Some have said that the film tells a story that uses the experiences of a struggling courtesan to examine the issues of class and rigid hierarchy in Japanese society in the Edo period. Is this accurate? I am not sure. Mizoguchi was no stranger to class struggle, but how consciously he was working in metaphor is unknown to me.

Kenji Mizoguchi, with another elegy on human suffering. The focus is on a young woman, but with an eye on the larger social world of organized injustice that expects a woman to be the image of a woman.A wide panorama of a cruel, patriarchal Japan emerges: servile men and women, obedient vassals to absent lords, bow their heads to the most icy whims, cold, selfish fathers sell their daughters to pay off a loan, fragile wives cower fearful that they might lose the affections of their disinterested husbands, snotty owners of upscale establishments crawl at the sight of money even if it comes by a peasant's hand, prayer is a mock ritual that comes before or after the most debasing acts. Youth and beauty are minutely groomed to be a pleasant diversion for money and power, and are finally banished from sight when the serve no more use.It is all meant to work as an expose on the harsh realities behind the cherry-blossomed idylls of medieval Japan, a world so completely controlled that only a cat, a supernatural agent, can expose its ugliness. It is educating to see, no doubt, but this function does not interest me overmuch. The single-minded focus on critique inadvertently irons out some of the complexities of a more elaborate world.One it preserves, therein lies the film's power for me: the relation between an abstract image, a reality cultivated to appear a certain way, and the tortured soul and heart that give rise to it. It is the crux of artistic expression, to go no further.It is important, to use this as a starting point, to be able to note in jidaigeki how submission is both social evil and spiritual practice. One does not negate the other, and this coexistence continues to power Japanese life and art to this day. Being a courtesan was its own artform, like cinema its own abstraction of the human experience, but we know that; we can take that from even the shoddy Memoirs of a Geisha. Mizoguchi, of course, posits that the abstraction was forced, or cultivated by necessity, and so first and foremostly social evil. This is the part that is readily available to Western audiences, who can draw from our own histories of repression.We see the fruits of that evil. The woman is finally stranded before the gates of hell, alone playing her sakuhachi. So where are the plum blossoms growing there, in the midst of suffering, as the Zen teachers used to say?The first layer has the tangy taste of irony; the woman is finally afforded some peace, but only as she submits to the image she has been groomed into. Her first client turns out to be a teacher of dharma, who uses her as a cautionary example of the transient world to his disciples. Again, she concedes to be the cultural image, the instrument, the agent, again a goblin cat that has suffered with beauty to expose ugliness. The second layer is where we are tricked to expect redemption. But it's again a bleak victory, that she can only disappear from her persecutors in the maze of their own gardens.The final image is the enigma of a small gesture, as the woman, offers a passing nod to a temple in the distance.It is a powerful work, but a little one-sided for what I expect from the best of films. It is right, of course, to condemn what it does from a bygone time; but since we can plainly see that we continue to suffer in our increasingly more democratic and comfortable lives, that it has not ended with the abolishment of this or that institution, how does the film address that human state that knows no boundaries?Ugetsu sees both ends with more clarity.

Mizoguchi's films are capable, I think, of teaching life lessons without preaching or grandstanding. This film could cause a male chauvinist to join a consciousness-raising make sensitivity group. In a simple,understated way, the film outlines the tyrannies that made happiness almost impossible for women, not only in feudal Japan, but all over the world. It comments on the use of women's bodies as sex objects and baby-making machines, with no regard for women's minds or feelings. Notice, by the way, that Oharu (Kinuyo Tanaka)is supposed to age from 18 to 50-and she really seems to age although makeup in the 1950s was not as advanced an art as it is now. The aging process is achieved through Tanaka's acting. And if she does not seem to us to be quite the ravaged old "witch" that one of her customers claims she is, then so much the better to let us know that she is being judged by an insensitive society.