Women of the Night (Yoru no onnatachi)
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Written by Yoshikato Yoda based on a story by Ejirô Hisaita
1948/Japan
Shôchiku Eiga
First viewing/Hulu Plus
[box] Sign in an Osaka neighborhood: Women loitering after dark may be arrested for prostitution. Upstanding women should not stay out past dark.[/box]
I’m so glad I did not have to try to survive in one of the Axis countries after their defeat in World War II. Mizoguchi is always worth watching if you can stand the misery.
Fusako Owada (the great Kinuye Tanaka) is living with her in-laws – her husband’s mother, brother, and teenage sister Kumiko. No one in the household has work. Fusako is tending to her toddler, who has tuberculosis, while waiting for her husband to return from the war. She is getting by by selling her old clothes. The used clothes woman suggests that she see a man who will pay her if she will give him a night he will never forget. She refuses.
The family hears an announcement on the radio saying there is news of Fusako’s husband. Fusako goes to her husband’s workplace only to be informed that he died in hospital. The husband’s former boss offers her his help. Then the baby dies. Fusako goes to work as the boss’s secretary and they start an affair.
By chance, Fusako runs into her younger sister Natsuko who has returned from Korea and had no way to find Fusako after her house burned down. She takes Natsuko to live with her in the apartment provided by the boss. Natsuko has been working as a dance hall hostess. Kumiko runs away and tries to join the sisters in the apartment but Fumiko tells her to go home. Instead she continues to look for excitement until she is raped and beaten into becoming a prostitute.
One day the police raid the boss’s business. Fusako takes a package of narcotics the firm has been smuggling to hide them in her apartment. When she goes inside she catches her boss-lover in flagrante with Natsuko. Fusako is so distraught that she disappears. When next we see her, she is tough as nails and walking the streets. She now has syphilis and has decided to get even with the entire male sex. When the boss is finally arrested for drug smuggling, Natsuko finds she is syphilitic and pregnant.
I won’t belabor the rest of the plot. Fusako tries to help both Natsuko and, eventually, Kumiko but things don’t get a heck of a lot better for any of the women.
Mizoguchi is noted as a feminist director but this is more of a moralistic tale. At least the women don’t spend the length of the film weeping as is common in some lesser Japanese movies. The other prostitutes are extremely cruel and Fusako’s independence is won at such a terrible price that it is hard to believe the director supports it. The acting is fantastic.
