Gion bayashi (A Geisha, 1953)

Mizoguchi Kenji

Japan

85 min, B&W, Japanese (English subtitles)

Set in the decade after the Second World War, the film tells about the naive sixteen year old Eiko (Wakao Ayako) who goes to the famed Gion district in Kyoto to ask her late mother's geisha "sister" Miyoharu (Kogure Michiyo) to take her as maiko (apprentice geisha). Eiko has nowhere else to turn: her mother is dead, her father has abandoned her, is seriously ill, and his business has failed, and her uncle is trying to force her to sleep with him to repay her mother's debts. Miyoharu takes her in even though Eiko's father refuses to be a guarantor.

A year later, Eiko is ready to go out to the first parties. Miyoharu borrows from her madame Okimi (Naniwa Chieko) in order to finance the ridiculously expensive official kimono for the young maiko. During their very first entertainment meeting, Miyoharu catches the eye of Kanzaki (Koshiba Kanji), an important executive whose advances she rejects. However, as Kanzaki is an important perspective client of Kusuda (Kawazu Seizaburô) who is a wealthy teahouse patron, the latter decides to pressure Okimi into getting Miyoharu to satisfy Kanzaki's "love" making him more pliable for the deal.

Since Kusuda himself has set his sights on Eiko, he invites them both to Tokyo. The two arrive there only to find that they are supposed to sleep with the two clients. The fiery Eiko refuses and when Kusuda tries to force her, she bites his tongue. Miyoharu uses the resulting commotion to reject Kanzaki's advances as well. As a result, Okimi, who is one of the most influential tea-house madames shuts the two out of business. All their parties are canceled, and their only source of income dries up.

Even then Miyoharu refuses to budge. The two stay at home in melancholy and brood. Finally, Eiko, who believes herself to be the reason for their predicament, goes off to Okimi and offers to take the despicable Kusuda as patron, mistakenly thinking that this will fix things. The shrewd (and ruthless) Okimi phones Miyoharu, knowing full well that this will bring her around.

And so it does. The most sad and beautiful scene in the film occurs when Miyoharu finally goes into Kanzaki's room. The man is lying on the tatami and barely turns around to acknowledge her. "I knew you would come," he tells her with a smug and all-important smile. He then turns away. After a fleeting moment of hesitation, she quietly enters and begins to undress. Not a single additional word is spoken, but as Miyoharu peels off her obi, then her robe, and then takes off her socks, we clearly see the pain with which she parts with her dignity. She gives in only to prevent Eiko from doing so.

In the conflict between the "pre-war" mentality and the impossible demands it makes on the "post-war" generation, the innocence of the latter is preserved only by the sacrifice of the former. Eiko is able to retain her purity, albeit not without a scar or two, only because Miyoharu finally succumbs to the ruthless and demeaning demands of the profession. As usual with Mizoguchi, it takes the unconditional love that culminates in the self-sacrifice of one human being to save another. Although he usually portrays women saving their wayward men, here the older geisha saves her young apprentice by doing something she had dilligently avoided during her long tenure: She becomes little more than a prostitute.

Thus, we see the inter-generational gap much explored by Ozu but without the quiet resolution offered by that director, who seems to have thought that each generation defines its own ways that, even if rejected by the other, are still found to have a right to existence on their own. Mizoguchi, on the other hand, is more realistic when he insists that the new cannot exist apart from the old, and that without the purposeful self-destructive act of the old, the new will become quickly as corrput and callous as the old it despises.

In a revealing scene, Eiko attempts to discuss the human rights granted by McArthur's constitution. She asks whether it is an infringement on her rights for a client to force himself on her. "In principle, yes" she is told by her instructor. The answer, however, is clearly the opposite. In the world of the geisha, human rights and dignity are void concepts. Eiko preserveres, asking if it's then OK to sue him, not realizing the irony of the setting: she is in the midst of an ikebana session designed to teach her how to be more pleasing to her clients. The incogruity is stunning: Eiko obviously does not realize what she's gotten herself into. The realization, when it comes, will thus be even more pitiful.

Finally, Mizoguchi's humanistic touch (he is perhaps the most humanistic of all Japanese directors) does not allow him the detached gaze of Ozu, moving him closer to Kurosawa. Unlike the latter, whose predilection for heavy-handed sermonizing is sometimes too obvious, Mizoguchi's understated and subtle approach serves best to illustrate the quiet suffering of women. After all, most of us live out the best and the worst in the secretive privacy of our hearts unable to share even with those closest to us. Human existence is a profoundly lonely affair.

Still, the director is careful to pinpoint the reason for the tragedy. It is in the industry itself, which would not exist if it were not for people like Kusuda and Kanzaki, who believe that affection is something they can easily purchase. That their world is the cause of the geisha's confinement is established from the opening shots as Eiko navigates the maze of streets to get to Miyoharu's house. The existence of the exitless labyrinth is reifnorced throughout.