52-53 / BD 36 Ugetsu monogatari & Oyū-sama

[andyli]

So they retained the thick booklet. That's good to know.

[peerpee]

I mentioned in another thread (can't remember where) that the booklets had to be trimmed down a touch from 80-pages and, I think 64-pages. To do so, we lost the modern essays and retained the original stories which inspired the films -- so the booklets are still quite hefty, but they are different to the DVD editions.

[Mike_S]

Bit late to the party on this one. But I watched the Blu-Ray of Ugetsu last night and was delighted by the way it looked. A huge thankyou to MoC for this one.

[Michael Kerpan]

So, thanks to the BD, I've revisited Oyu-sama for the first time in years (at least 5, probably a bit more). I found it even MORE melodramatic than I had remembered, but also more visually beautiful. Even the beauty can't make the underlying story really credible, but the beauty offers sufficient rewards for its own sake.

[Der Spieler]

I watched Oyu-sama yesterday too and I must admit I didn't find it particularly captivating.

[Michael Kerpan]

I watched Oyu-sama yesterday too and I must admit I didn't find it particularly captivating.

Was the hard-to-believe plot your main obstruction?

[Der Spieler]

I watched Oyu-sama yesterday too and I must admit I didn't find it particularly captivating.

Was the hard-to-believe plot your main obstruction?

Mainly. In fact, I found the whole movie way too melodramatic. It didn't seem believable to me that a woman would say: "Oh darling, I know you wanna bang my sister and I love her so much that I'll actually live the life of a nun so you won't have to cheat on her with me, your wife."

It wasn't a bad movie by any means but when the whole set-up is unbelievable it's just hard to get into it.

[FerdinandGriffon]

I think it makes more sense in/with the context of the Tanizaki novel on which it is based. The Oyu-sama/Reed Cutters story is a gender reversed version of the plot that lies at the heart of much of Tanizaki's work: a romantic triangle where one man offers his wife to another. Tanizaki had done exactly this in his own life, handing off his first wife to his friend Haruo Sato. Though in that case it seems to have been an arrangement amenable to all parties, the scenario and its psychological and erotic implications obsessed him thoughout his career as a writer, up to and through late works like The Key. The only other writer I can think of who has studied this theme with such careful and constant attention is Pierre Klossowski.

I like Mizoguchi's film, but I don't think viewers do it any favors by trying to place Oyu and her sister in the director's pantheon of suffering priestess and mothers. This is a story about erotic obsession, with Oyu as both manipulator and victim of that obsession. And Shizu is no innocent either. She has an unhealthy fixation on her sister, and there are voyeuristic and dominating aspects to her chaperoning. By enabling and overseeing Shinosuke and Oyu's (ultimately unconsumated) trysts she is able to enjoy and possess both of them by the proxy of the other. Tanizaki is pretty explicit about this, Mizoguchi less so, but the extreme sensuousness of the film and its mise-en-scene go along way to create a decadent atmosphere that the script my not have been allowed to. In Tony Rayn's introduction on the disc, he calls the tickling scene chaste. I think he's dead wrong. This is a painfully erotic scene, and one in which Oyu comes dangerously close to knowingly initiating a genuine menage-a-trois. Rayns also seems to ignore the implications of the scene where Shinosuke attends to Oyu after she faints. Shinosuke is a man capable of rape under certain extraordinary circumstances, and Oyu is a woman who will continue to encourage the presence of a man who might have ravished her.

Part of the reason that I think these misinterpretations might happen is that Mizoguchi or the studio made some very dubious changes to the ending. In Tanizaki's novel, Oyu and Shinosuke's story is mediated by several narrators. A present day traveller is told the story by a stranger who later turns out to be Shinosuke's son by Shizu. This man heard the story in turn from his father, who used to bring his pre-adolescent son with him on expeditions to spy on Oyu after she married the sake dealer. This frame is very helpful to the reader, as it establishes the essentially voyeuristic nature of the plot and of all the major characters' relationships. Rayns' says this framing story still existed in the first drafts of the script before the studio head vetoed it, so probably the final ending, which melodramatically implies the essential goodness and purity of all the characters, was a studio imposition as well (brilliantly shot as it is).

Compromised it may be, but I'd still say this is one of Mizoguchi's most gorgeous, sumptuously photographed films, and the actors are superb, including Tanaka, who I don't think is miscast at all, in spite of her age.

[Michael Kerpan]

FG -- great comments. And I think I agree with almost everything you say. The element of sexual "perversity" (a la Kagi) registered strongly, despite the studio-imposed story softening. Nothing at all chaste about the tickling scene. If there is an "innocent" here, it seems to be Shinosuke -- who would have happily married Oyu, if permitted to -- and who seems to be somewhat uncomfortable with the arrangement (at least at times).

I think Madame Yuki might be even more visually gorgeous, but Oyu-sama is certainly near the top in this respect.

[Stefan Andersson]

The English translation of the song at the end of Oyu-sama on the DVD reads differently than the one in the book, taken from the Keiko McDonald piece.

Any comments on the translation(s) would be appreciated.

McDonald says it comes from a Noh play. Anybody know which one?

[tingyun]

The English translation of the song at the end of Oyu-sama on the DVD reads differently than the one in the book, taken from the Keiko McDonald piece.

Any comments on the translation(s) would be appreciated.

McDonald says it comes from a Noh play. Anybody know which one?

If I'm right, the song at the end is excerpted from "Yuya" (熊野), one of the better-known Noh plays. I don't have the film at hand and can't remember which lines from the play were featured in the film. You might refer to the following website and try to locate the overlapping section in the script. This website offers a full English translation of the "Yuya" play.

http://www.the-noh.com/jp/plays/data/program_016.html

Again I don't have the film right now and the certainty of my words is compromised. Sorry if I have been misleading. The bottom line is that you might enjoy "Yuya" on its own right, regardless of its relevance to the film that we truly mean to talk about.

[Stefan Andersson]

Thank you very much tingyun!