Made the same year as another great Mizoguchi film, Osaka Elegy, this portrait of geisha life in contemporary Gion is probably the first full expression of the director’s “signature” style, involving a constantly itinerant camera, odd high angles, and an absence of closeups (until the final shot). And like the other film, Sisters of the Gion also shows Mizoguchi’s great debt to Josef von Sternberg, with the foreground obscurities and generally murky mise-en-scene that make up the geisha’s heterocosm. It also quite neatly foreshadows Mizoguchi’s last film, Street of Shame, with which it shared a bill at Film Forum last night, and which I reviewed for Reverse Shot here.
All in all, I actually wish Mizoguchi made more of this type of film. Until the pieces of the plot fall fully into place, it’s actually quite a funny film, with Isuzu Yamada portraying a kind of plucky, Eastern version of Marlene Dietrich in the face of a cruelly indifferent masculine world. As much as I love Mizoguchi’s other films, they often veer on sadism, as in the almost unbearably grim The Life of Oharu.
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Janus Films 35mm Print
22 Sep 2006 6:26 PM | Submit Comment