Utamaro and His Five Women | |
---|---|
Directed by | Kenji Mizoguchi |
Written by | Yoshikata Yoda |
Starring |
Minosuke Bandō Kinuyo Tanaka Kōtarō Bandō Hiroko Kawasaki Toshiko Iizuka |
Cinematography | Minoru Miki |
Edited by | Shintarō Miyamoto |
Distributed by | Shochiku |
Release date
|
17 December 1946 |
Running time
|
106 minutes |
Country | Japan |
Language | Japanese |
Utamaro and His Five Women or Five Women Around Utamaro (Japanese: 歌麿をめぐる五人の女 Hepburn: Utamaro o meguru gonin no onna?) is a 1946 Japanese film directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. It is based on the novel of the same title by Kanji Kunieda, itself a fictionalized account of the life of printmaker Kitagawa Utamaro. It was Mizoguchi's first film made under the American occupation.
Mizoguchi was fascinated by painting and had trained as a painter as a young man. Kitagawa Utamaro (1756-1806) was 'possibly the greatest of all the portraitists of the floating world' - he painted also idyllic outdoor scenes, Yoshiwara festivals and drinking bouts, bathers and shell-divers, as well as erotica. The film dramatically presents this sense of range, and openness to life's variety, and contrasts the old official court-approved style of painting, called kano with the new, dynamic form of painting known as ukiyo-e (literally:paintings of the floating world).
The story is set in Edo (now Tōkyō) in Japan.
The film starts with a parade of samurai and their concubines (oiran, distinguished by their high shoes) along an avenue of cherry trees. Koide, called Seinosuke by his woman Yukie (Kotaro Bando), an artist/samurai apprenticed to a Kanō master, leaves the parade and visits a print shop where he sees a woodcut print by Utamaro that boasts of ukiyo-e 's superiority to the official style. Enraged, he goes to a tea-house to find Tsutaya Jūzaburō, the owner of the print shop, to express his displeasure. Word is leaked to Utamaro to avoid the tea-shop, but instead he goes there directly to investigate. Koide then challenges him to a duel. Utamaro counter-challenges him with a different kind of duel––a painting contest.