Kon Ichikawa | 雪之丞変化 Yukinojo henge (An Actor’s Revenge) / 1963

loving yukinojo

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nato Wada (writer, based on a film by Daisuke Itō and Teinosuke Kinugasa), Kon Ichikawa (director) 雪之丞変化 Yukinojo henge (An Actor’s Revenge) / 1963

 

Film historians report that after a string of financially unsuccessful films—films that, however, were often critically acclaimed—Ichikawa was assigned to remake Yukinojo henge (An Actor’s Revenge), based on an older novel by Otokichi Mikami and previously made as three-part serial by Teinosuke Kinugasa in 1935 and 1936, starring Kazuo Hasegawa. Critic Donald Richie humorously describes the task to be “like asking Buñuel to remake Stella Dallas.” Yet Ichikawa, working with his wife and life-long collaborator, Natto Wada as the screenwriter, brilliantly rose to the occasion, even employing the original actor, in his 300th movie role, in the lead role of the Kabuki female impersonator Yukinojo and in the role of her secret admirer and the film’s narrative commentator, the thief Yamitaro.

     With the use of highly saturated colors and a score that—despite the film’s setting in the Tokugawa period of Japanese history (1603-1867)—employs romantic theme music of the 1950s melodramas as well as contemporary jazz, Ichikawa creates a work that might easily be compared with the films of American directors of the 1950s such as Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray.

      During the midst of her performance in Edo, Yukinojo catches a glimpse in the audience of the wealthy merchant Kawaguchiya, accompanied by the corrupt magistrate Sansai Dobe and Dobe’s daughter Namiji, the mistress of the powerful shogun. The two men, along with another merchant, Hiromiya, have been responsible for her father’s and mother’s deaths, the facts of which have been kept alive in Yukinojo’s mind by her manager-mentor. After all these years, it is now time for revenge.

 

     It is clear from the very first scene that the beautiful Namiji has fallen in love with Yukinojo—the fact of which, given Kazuo Hasegawa’s advanced age and his retention of the mannerisms and dress of a woman throughout the film, merely accentuates the theatricality and artificiality of the work. Combined with the introduction into the film of Yamitaro, a charming thief from whose attempted robbery and murder Yukinojo escapes—and who comes to admire and perhaps even love Yuinojo—along with Yukinojo’s repeated run-ins with Yamitaro’s competitor, the woman thief Ohatsu, who ultimately declares she too has fallen in love with Yukinojo—An Actor’s Revenge might be dismissed as a strange black sex comedy ahead of its time were it not for the Hasegawa’s brilliant acting and Ichikawa’s refusal to permit what we would now describe as post-modern intrusions to alter the focus of his larger- than-life historical adventure: the destruction of the evil men who destroy anyone in stands in the way of their greed and lust for power.

     Through repeated gestures of servility to these proud men, several swordfights, wile, stealth, and outright lies, Yukinojo gains entry to their houses and is a given a modicum of trust which permits her to carefully weave hearsay and rumor into a net of consequences in which each man is ultimately trapped, as they turn against one another and, particularly in the case of Sansai Dobe, destroy themselves.

     Unfortunately, the delicate Namiji, a woman—unlike Yukinojo (a man behaving as a woman) or Ohatsu (a woman with the physical prowess and unchecked confidence of a man)—finds herself trapped in the net as well, and as her innocence is betrayed, dies. Yukinojo leaves the theater, disappearing from sight and, eventually, we are told, even from memory.

      In telling her story, however, Ichikawa has clearly created a legend that explores the complex issues of human sexuality more thoroughly than most films of the day.

 

Los Angeles, March 26, 2008

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (March 2008).