The Downfall of Osen

The Downfall of Osen (折鶴お千, or Orizuru Osen) is a 1935 silent film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi, with benshi accompaniment. It stars Isuzu Yamada (who also appears in Mizoguchi’s 1936 films Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion) and is based on a novel by Izumi Kyoka, which, as far as I know, hasn’t been translated into English.

This is one of Mizoguchi’s most acclaimed early films, but it didn’t hold my attention as much as The Water Magician, to which it’s similar in terms of themes: the maternal lover, the destitute and ostensibly asexual boy who dreams only of completing his education, and the woman’s total sacrifice of body and mind for the boy’s success. In The Water Magician, the heroine Shiraito (played by Takako Irie) ultimately sacrifices her very existence. Here, Mizoguchi takes a different route with Osen, having her descend into madness instead, driven past the brink as she tries to protect the boy from the corruption and evils of society.

A couple of other things struck me. First, the narrative is nonlinear. It opens with the boy, now a man and a doctor, and Osen at a train station, where operations are temporarily halted by a sudden downpour. Neither realizes the other is there. Both are lost in their memories. Much of the film unfolds through flashbacks, which are themselves not chronological, and even includes a flashback within a flashback to a time before the station sequence. Toward the end, the story returns to the station before moving forward again. What?! This feels postmodern, but wasn't the postmodern narrative introduced in films a decade or two later? What other 1930s film does this?

Second, I’ve read enough about Mizoguchi to get the sense that critics tend to focus primarily on the female characters and their roles. But what about the men? Watching The Downfall of Osen, I started to imagine the Mizoguchi heroine as a pinball, knocked around until she ultimately drops out of play. The bumpers are different types of men: innocent, iniquitous, dutiful, immoral, religious. Our attention is on her as she navigates these forces, nurturing at times but always bearing the consequences of their largely self-serving actions. But Mizoguchi was surely just as aware of the roles and representations of men, and may have worked through his own ideas about desire, responsibility and moral conflict through them, as well as the impact of male behavior on women.

Mistress of a Foreigner

Mistress of a Foreigner (1930) (based on a novel by Gisaburo Juichiya) was also directed by Mizoguchi, but only around four minutes of it are known to exist. I watched what's left of the film after seeing The Downfall of Osen, and it's basically a dance performance set to music and book-ended by scenes of waves lapping a shoreline. Unfortunately there is very little information available in English or Japanese about this fragment or the film itself.

The Downfall of Osen (here and below)