UTAMARO AND HIS FIVE WOMEN Movie Review

Five Women around Utamaro
Utamaro O Meguru Gonin No Onna

Utamaro was a legendary 18th-century Japanese printmaker who gained inspiration from the demimonde of Edo, a sordid and disreputable environment of brothels, public drunkenness, and passionate love affairs. The director, Kenji Mizoguchi, was himself an artist concerned with areas of society that are often less than respectable, and the emotional commitment to his subjects that he conveys in his great film tragedies like Life of Oharu and Chikamatsu Monogatari makes his interest in Utamaro's painting all the more persuasive. Utamaro participated in the sensory excesses of his society only through his art, and Mizoguchi's film lets us experience that strange and sometimes blurred borderline between the artist and his subject. This is a rigorous and fascinating biography, visually beautiful, though not in a league with his greatest masterworks.

NEXT STOP … Ugetsu, Andrei Rublev, Edvard Munch

1946 89m/B JP Minnosuke Bando, Kinuyo Tanaka, Kotaro Bando, Hisato Osawa, Tamezo Mochizuki, Hiroko Kawasaki; D: Kenji Mizoguchi; W: Yoshikata Yoda; C: Shigeto Miki; M: Hisato Osawa, Tamezo Mochizuki. VHS NYF, FCT