Every Little Thing I Adore About 'Ugetsu Monogatari'

My ‘journey’ with Ugetsu started when I was 16, just after the start of college. After a steady diet of classic British & American film since my parents sparked my love for cinema a few years earlier I’d dove headfirst into movies like ‘Bicycle Thieves’ and ‘The Seventh Seal’ thanks to their easy access on YouTube.

And it was Ugetsu that brought that giddy wave of magic crashing down. Back when I was still young enough to justify using the word ‘overrated’ it fronted the bill second to note- I never got it. And once every other year I’d go back to it and continue to wonder why.

Recently I saw it again, and perhaps out of the context of my own fresh pain it all clicked. I sprung into a love affair with its director, Kenji Mizoguchi, and hunted down all of his surviving films. He was a prolific artist, remains one of film’s greatest feminists and will always be the undisputed master of pain- and not in a Cenobite sense. See what I mean here…

The way Mizoguchi starts the film with a HUGE crane shot sweeping across fields, then stooping down into a township- but plays it off so naturally. He’s a master of delicate directorial precision balanced against the story and characters.

The first of many piercing aphorisms sprinkled throughout the script…

…And I think his (co)writing is so carefully tempered against his directing, particularly at the start of films. Nobody begins a movie with quite the same energy as Mizoguchi. It’s always so calm, almost serene- but something lingers on the edges of his wide angle shots and long takes. He establishes a place so patiently, with graceful shots that rarely cut- but there’s always the feeling of a peaceful world open to attack.

How easily Tobee sneaks through a camp buzzing with soldiers and how much it says about it character, as if they all have something better to do.

…And the way he peers in embarrassed when he’s dismissed.

Mizoguchi had an (oft-broken) maxim of “one shot, one scene” and I’m so taken by the way his use of the ‘long take’ differs from so many others throughout cinema. A contemporary like Max Ophüls crafted swooning, gorgeous set-pieces; then later slow-cinema pioneers like Andrei Tarkovsky, Theo Angelopoulos & Bela Tarr all constructed living, breathing pieces of time. Mizoguchi, however, has none of their (brilliant) stylistic indulgences. He holds as life unfolds- with beauty or pain spared the cut no matter how much we might want it. It’s not about enhancing the artfulness of the film, but getting a living feel for how these people are in their own space.

His second-to-none composition also helps. If we’re going to be shown something for a long time, filling it with illuminating details doesn’t hurt.

I’ve also noticed he tends to hang back in moments of panic, where other directors will often push in closer to a character’s emotion. This cut as we learn an army is coming to burn everything they’ve ever built down rockets us back almost to the perspective of a cinema seat. In his own bizarre way, the best way to involve the audience was to acknowledge their position: Its not a choker close up of someone losing their mind- but a distant reminder that we are helpless to end their suffering.

Lingering just a second 'too long' on this swinging pot as the town is evacuated.

For those who don’t know, Mizoguchi was one of cinema’s most stalwart feminists and was never apologetic about his bitterly realistic depictions of human suffering. The world we were introduced to not twenty minutes ago has turned on a dime as soldiers giggle like children in a doorway as two innocent villagers are forced inside and raped.

He was also a master of using composition and light to convey feeling with burning empathy: Here the dark walls of these women’s hearts crush in like a vice as their child is snatched away.

The blocking in the shots of their escape. Not just showing a sea of sad faces but instead the backs of heads gets the point across perfectly.

This Aguirre-esque hillside.

The extras running along in the background bring such a subtle sense of life to this shot. Its not just a film crew sat in front of a scene where people pack a boat- the world around them is alive.

The fact that Mizoguchi shot quite a few boat scenes at this point in his career, perhaps because this one was so damn good.

How gleeful this line reading is. What a world.

It seems clear this is some kind of soundstage, but how long did it take them to get these fog effects- particularly with early 50s equipment. An unforgettable blend of dream and nightmare all at once.

The absolute silence that falls over the film as they decide to take the women back to shore, then sail back into the claws of the mist.

…In the same vein as the previous point, Mizoguchi’s camerawork often takes on its own character- involving us as a ghostly observer just close enough to see everything fall- in the same way that his scenarios feel familiar enough to weaponize cliché. We know exactly what’s going to happen- and that’s what makes the inevitability all the more chilling. It’s Hichcock’s bomb in a room suspense theory stretched across the skin of an entire film.

The way the characters look directly into camera (at eachother) for this scene. Perhaps inspired by his contemporary Ozu’s 360 degree shooting style?

Again with the composition, there’s always this off-centre magnetism.

The dull, heart-like drum beat pounding through this frantic, mortifying scene.

The fact they bring her into an abandoned shrine.

fucking hell.

These angles on the aftermath.

The sparkling score that cues this touching out-of-nowhere dream sequence. Always feel free to shoot what you want.

This cutaway of their shadows creeping up towards the old mansion.

Mizoguchi was in love of using gnarled branches in his compositions, even sneaking them by hand into the edges of frame like a warning that what we’ve done to the world waits for us if we continue…

Again with the off-centre compositions, in this case a grim warning that if the character lets themselves compete the symmetry they’ll be falling into a trap.

Case in point…

This hopeful, telling gem in a film so entrenched in desperation.

There’s something so eerie about the servant in the foreground who sits like some kind of stone idol in this minute-long shot.

I have no idea how they did this and it might be hard to see, but as the Lady skips away he lets out one short, ice-cold condensed breath. What a brilliant, subtle detail.

Darkness suffocating her as the song ends.

Mizoguchi was often sparing with his fades- saving them for use at the perfect moment.

This practically futuristic transition where we tilt and pan down from a hot spring, then crossfade on the ground and come up to that shot. Magic.

The brutal cut-in from the last, blissfully romantic scene to that man’s abandoned wife alone in the forest- listening to the screams of other women while the soldiers have their way. Its almost like he waits for us to get swept up in the new story and forget the other characters and responsibilities before cracking them right back in our face. There's an art to knowing when to cut back into a thread during an ensemble story and he elevates it here.

The complex humanity of a scene where soldiers who’ve done nothing but rape and pillage beg a woman for her baby’s food.

And the mother struggling to her feet and pressing on after she’s been stabbed.

The heaving moment of pause after Tobee kills for the first time.

The fact Tobee wins favour by bringing a general’s head to his commander. A general who was decapitated, by his second (the man Tobee just gutted), while committing honourable seppuku.

His pompous grin as he rides through town never fails to make me laugh.

More brilliant crowd blocking, Kurosawa eat your heart out.

The genius piece of writing that is Tobee, riding the crest of his newly-stolen fame, running into his abandoned wife at a brothel and discovering she has turned to prostitution to survive. Mizoguchi had such a cutting way of strangling machismo with its own tail.

This horrible line.

Them falling back together, finally, and obscuring their faces- as if they’re so mortified they don’t want us to see.

The chilling silence of this cut, and the lonely triangle-hit that summons it.

Another futuristic technique- this time in the soundtrack as we build up to this reveal with a percussive roar. It sounds like it was created by scraping a block across a gong, but in 1953 this would have been untreated- and it sounds so eerily similar to the digitised sonic stingers in a 21^st century horror film.

This blocking.

The camera creeping towards Genjuro and him looking right into the lens as he scrambles away.

Composition.

The faintest sound of her siren song as he realises the mansion is an illusion- and how it grows the longer he stays. Haunting.

The camera creeping into Miyagi when Genjuro returns, closer than we’ve been to any face before- the silent shape of her in the next shot- and the way Mizoguchi’s pan leaves her out of it thereafter.

The most brutal scene in a film touched by rape, murder, kidnapping and sexual slavery is the way Mizoguchi wordlessly details Miyagi cleaning up after her husband and child for a few minutes after they’re asleep…

…I love the way the score changes as she lights the candle, then sits still as the sun rises and only highlights the darkness around her. There’s no word other than profound for Mizoguchi’s choice to cap off a tale of ghost stories and samurai attacks than leaving us alone with a woman who endured it all, quietly bringing one last spark into the lives of her family in spite of everything…

…And the soul of the scene is battered into immortality by this fucking hammerblow:

Her whispering to him at the grave…

The camera revealing their son as this line plays.

And finally their son rearranging the leafy weed they’ve found in-stead of flowers on her resting place before we crane up to reveal the same field the film opened on. Mizoguchi often drags his characters through hell and back and there’s never really a joyous catharsis- their pain isn’t repaid with a happy ending. What we’re left with is the possibility for change. There’s a refreshingly honest humanity in the way he traces his characters being attacked by the worst of people and then following them on their potential path to becoming the exact same brand of vile. It’s up to them to escape the cycle, and it’s down to you to believe if they do.