The Straits of Love and Hate

It is an unspeakable tragedy and outrage that Mizoguchi Kenji's follow-up to his one-two punch of Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion should exist today in a hissing, deeply scarred print with such horribly translated subtitles I imagine even the "Navajo English" Jean-Luc Godard used for his latest film are more coherent. So terrible are the subtitles that this review will be brief because I simply could not figure out what was really being said -- hell, I had to scour the Internet to make sure I'd even got a basic understanding of the plot right (in some respects, I hadn't). Even then, trying to find anything on the film was itself a chore. How could The Straits of Love and Hate have fallen so completely through the cracks, even among cinephiles?

It makes no sense, especially when you consider that its formal meticulousness makes it simply one of the most beautiful films ever made, and certainly one of the most daring uses of deep focus in the pre-Citizen Kane era. Compositions place characters in the middle and background planes, almost entirely forbidding close-ups. Yet the emotional complexity of the film -- which could partially be explained by the botched subtitles keeping any obvious dialogue, if it exists, out of the equation -- makes these characters so piercing that you forget how consistently the director refuses to take visual shortcuts.

After using the more cramped, if still elegant, mise-en-scène of his previous two features to emphasize the crush of society on women, Mizoguchi literally pulls back to tell the tale of a country girl impregnated by her lover, a feckless and irresponsible son of the local innkeeper whose rejection compels her to join a traveling kabuki troupe to get away. By placing the characters farther away from the lens, Mizoguchi surrounds them with space, to the point that the cramped 1:37:1 aspect ratio might as well be a three-projector Cinerama show.

The composition stresses the transience of the characters, highlighting the various places the troupe visits. Less literally, these shots convey the sense of doubt. Ofumi (Fumiko Yamaji) does not know how she will live and support a child on the meager subsistence of acting, and the entire troupe must share her concern when they play to half-empty halls and the handful of tiny theaters that remain for this kind of attraction. Where melodrama filled his previous features and meshed well with his ornate style, the mood and behavior in The Straits of Love and Hate is quieter, more realistic, even as the direction leaps forward.

Mizoguchi focuses upon the small travails of life, the trouble of quieting a screaming baby on a packed train, the timidity of a potential relationship with another member of the troupe. People speak of money issues the way that we still do today, with that fatalistic sigh and chuckle made from the world weighing down on you and forcing air out of your lungs. Prostitution becomes such a way of life that those trapped in it speak as if it were no different than any other job.

That such frank and subtle action is framed so immaculately could lead one to suspect a disconnect between direction and performance, but Mizoguchi's camera only enhances the film's power. Having moved in the direction of longer takes of alternating static shots and graceful track-pans between Osaka Elegy and Sisters of the Gion, the director takes an even bolder step here. Some shots are so perfectly constructed that they surprised me. An early scene places Ofumi in the foreground and her lover farther back, yet when they pivot, they line up on a diagonal plane. Suddenly, the cramped room where they argue opens up as another character climbs down the stairs to enter the background perpendicular to the preceding action. The simple act of a man coming down some stairs has a jarring effect because of the way that even basic staging can suddenly change, even in a static shot. Before this remarkable scene, the director uses a tracking shot to follow a group of characters who remain on the same plane even when their path curves and the camera must pan as it tracks to follow the action. Familiar tracks through rooms bring back Mizoguchi's penchant for crossing through rooms to emphasize the physical barriers rather than simply jumping into each room with a quick edit. At times, I wondered if he set the film with a kabuki troupe to take advantage of the labyrinthine structures of kabuki theaters, which allow for numerous shots of such powerful formalism that the mise-en-scène almost looks avant-garde.

Once again, Mizoguchi centers the action on a woman character, going so far as to tell the story of the source material from the opposite angle. Leo Tolstoy's novel Resurrection was a popular book among Japanese filmmakers, who made adaptations before and after this 1937 work. But rather than stay with the man who deals with his guilt for impregnating and denouncing a servant, Mizoguchi changes course and follows the wronged woman, showing how the horrors of the real world that seem even worse to a sheltered brat like Tolstoy's nobleman Nekhlyudov can actually offer some degree of fulfillment for those who've lived in it all their lives.

Compared to the tragedy that flecks most of the director's movies, The Straits of Love and Hate displays a hard-won optimism that reflects the complexity of the emotional arc. Though Ofumi has plenty of worries concerning her new lifestyle, she has the freedom to choose a life of doubt with the potential for liberty than a secure living as the servant of a lover whose penitence upon meeting Ofumi again does not guarantee he won't flake again. If Ofumi returns, she'll simply be a slave, waiting on her husband and dealing with his judgmental father, the man who could so callously blame her for his son's indiscretion. The film's ambiguities and realistic contradictions mirror the production, during which, according to some, the feminist, beloved Mizoguchi forced his lead actress to rehearse a scene 700 times. Even setting aside the gender questions this raises, such a story -- if true -- speaks to the relationship between believable flaws and unyielding perfectionism that make The Straits of Love and Hate one of the mostly unjustly ignored films of all time. Let us pray that restorative work is done one of these days.