Gary Halvorson and Ivo van Hove | Don Giovanni / 2023 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

state of confusion

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lorenzo da Ponte (libretto, after a libretto by Giovanni Bertati), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (composer), Ivo van Hove (stage director), Gary Halvorson (director) Don Giovanni / 2023 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

Oh dear, those Belgium boys are at it again, Ivo van Hove and his partner Jan Versweyveld asking us to join the characters in moral judgment of the libertine hero who’s been acting up with what some have suggested, over the years, as simply the bad boy behavior of raping a few thousand women, cataloguing his conquests, and now killing off one of their dads who dares to interfere.  

     They certainly do take all of the fun out of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s dramma giocsco, as it was originally described, and which the Oxford Dictionary explains is “a comic opera containing tragic features.” These some thousands, along with the women of this story, Donna Elvira (Ana María Martínez), Donna Anna (Federica Lombardi), and Zerlina (Ying Fang) make for some mean “Me Too-ers” along with their fiancès Don Ottavio (Ben Bliss) and Masetto (Alfred Walker)—and, of course, the director and even more obviously his companion’s set design review the so-called comic opera through a new lens.

     The streets of Seville have never looked less inviting, with windowless mud-brown and pea-green lit walls, passages that seem to lead nowhere, and bridges that wind, circle, and cross in impossible-to-imagine spaces, evincing, as The New York Times critic Zachary Woolfe describes it, the influences “the paintings of de Chirico and Hopper” and the “lurking staircases…[and] the winding labyrinths of M.C. Escher.” In an inter-act interview with Erin Morley, van Hove reconfirmed that Escher had been a major influence of Versweyveld’s design. In short, the world they create is a kind of inky noir not unlike those of the last days of the Weimar Republic.

      This is most certainly not a comic landscape—but after all the very first action of the play concerns a foiled rape and a murder of the young woman’s father, the Commendatore (Alexander Tsymbalyuk), not as a result in this MET production of some fancy sword play but with the cold machine of a gun. Only a short while later, moreover, Don Giovanni (Peter Mattei) lures another woman away from her own wedding.

      Even I, in reaction to a far more traditional production by the LAOpera I had seen more than a decade earlier, had described Don Giovanni’s first act as being somewhat like “an intense Western, wherein the hero’s luck has changed, as in a movie like John Sturges’ Bad Day at Black Rock, where everything seems to be going against the already maimed man.” I added, “Of course, Don Giovanni is not really a hero,” which in von Hove’s production so apparent that we need not even mention it.

     Indeed, I’d never before realized just how fully Mozart’s first act lays out the charges against Don Giovanni, one by one. We are witnesses, of course, to the attempted rape of Donna Anna and his wooing away from the wedding of Zerlina. If we needed even more evidence of Giovanni’s lasciviousness, we have his unhappy accomplice Leporello’s (Adam Plachetka) own testaments from the books Giovanni himself keeps about his conquests. And finally, we have the fury of one of his most recent victims, the almost foolish Donna Elvira, who convinced that he had all but married her before his abandonment, sings out her anger in “Ah! chi mi dice mai.”

     It is hardly surprising that in a world in which the wealthy Giovanni and his peers represent the controlling order of their society that Donna Anna demands her boyfriend Don Ottavio seek revenge by murdering the man, who she suddenly recognizes as Giovanni through his voice—visual recognition being nearly impossible in this world in which costumes and masks predominate. 

    If in many a production of this opera, Ottavio seems not entirely complaisant with performing such an act, in Bliss’ performance of the role, it is clear that he is ready to go along with her, gloriously singing “Dalla sua pace,” as he insits that such beauty cannot be denied its desires.

     As if we had not yet had enough evidence, however, Giovanni now throws a masked ball simply so that he might continue with his seduction of Zerlina, made possible by Leporello’s distraction of Masetto with a German dance. But Zerlina’s screams bring all the vengeful pack down upon the culprit, and by the end of Act I, we see the man cornered, ridiculously trying to blame his most recent criminal actions on Leporello. It’s all a cheap act, as hokey, we perceive, as the dozens of manikins openly placed by the opera prop workers in the windows to stand-in for the high society members supposedly attending Giovanni’s festivities. And we are nearly certain, accordingly, that this time the criminal will not escape.

     The first act accordingly, clearly shows us the evils both of Giovanni and the society in which such men exist, and firmly lays out the charges for his horrific behavior. It is only in Act II that any comic moments creep into to what we can now recognize it almost as the damnation of Don Juan.

     With Versweyyeld’s cityscape still in place, any would-be comedians and their machinations can only enter and exit through narrow pathways and creaky bridges. But amazingly Giovanni has done just that, escaped into a landscape wherein the smoky back and side streets he safely hides. As I mentioned in my earlier discussion of this opera, what amazes me is that this wealthy man, who might celebrate a life of pleasure within his own palace, spends almost his entire life on the streets like a mad homeless person looking for anyone upon whom he might prey.

     And he’s not very picky in his selection of women, for he now goes after Donna Elvira’s maid. But to get there, he must first remove her mistress, and to do that he brilliantly determines to put his accomplice Leporello on display, dressed in his own garb—as a century later Cyrano de Bergerac would voice his love behind a manikin-like cadet—with Giovanni singing of his renewed love for his Elvira in “Deh vieni alla finestra.” 

     That she falls for it makes us question her entire credibility, just as, soon after, we must once again question Zerlina’s devotion to Masetto as she tries to win him back for her now several encounters with the villain. As most of us have come to realize through today’s newspaper headlines and court-room hearings, women who have raped are nearly always subject eventually to doubts. How much, for example, were they involved in the sexual abduction? Even when we look back at the first scene, we recognize that Donna Anna’s attempts to keep him from escaping look somewhat similar to a woman trying to keep the rapist by her side. Even as witnesses, we begin to doubt her veracity.

      In this Act even the loyal Ottavio eventually begins to wonder when his fiancée will stop long enough in her determination to revenge her father’s death in order to show her love and marry him. Bliss demonstrates himself a consummate performer as he coyly draws attention away from her endless pleas for justice through what The Times critic Wolfe describes as his “added assertive ornaments to his arias,” which he found odd since “such ornamentation was rare among the rest of the cast.” Ottavio clearly wants some attention, proving it not only in his brilliant devotional arias, but moving off to sit down on the street and pout.

      It is in Act II, moreover, that we truly get to hear how suave and brilliant Giovanni truly is, the opera allowing Mattei finally to portray his vocal flexibility. In “Ah taci ingiusto core” and other such moments we truly come to recognize how even normally level-headed women might be tempted by his seductive charms. And given the state of confusion in which all three of the formerly determined females now exist, is it any wonder that Elvira spends nearly an entire evening with Leporello in disguise as his master, and the others, trying to track down the evil-doer are ordered by his own instructions to break up and move off in two opposite directions? Like the city as portrayed in the set, their world is mirror of illusions and, as they themselves begin to ponder, perhaps delusions as well.

      If human order is thus so disoriented, it is to the gods or would-be gods such as Satan that we must look for justice. The ghost of Commendatore also haunts these streets and finally chooses to appear before his victim when Giovanni, having failed to find a single woman with whom he might make love and being sought out by so many of the city’s residents for revenge, is at his most vulnerable.

      Yet even now, he cannot see what stands before him, although the only someone less deluded Leporello can. Terrified by the specter, Giovanni’s “other” recognizes him as death, reporting back to his master what he has witnessed. The hot-headed abuser challenges even the invisible pursuer to join him for dinner, demanding that Leporello pass on his invitation even to the world he surely senses represents a terrifying fate.

      Now doomed, even in his own vague bluffs, Giovanni retreats into the full infantility that his acts have always represented. At first, like Wolfe, I was flummoxed by the truly silly dinner scene at which Giovanni begins literally to play with his pasta, juggle his bread, and finally throw edible items at his friend before tossing over the whole table. But then one doesn’t have to have seen many adolescent food-fight scenes in the movies to realize what is at the heart of the great Don Giovanni’s bad-boy behavior. He is still a frustrated child who never grew up, raping women because he hasn’t a clue how to actually behave for more than a few moments in their presence.  But the real world has no place left for 60-year-old man with the brain of reform-school punk. The devil takes him straight to hell, no fire and brimstone needed in von Hove’s and Versweyyeld’s stark reality.

      As if, suddenly, order had been restored by the hand of God, the cold, dank streets of Seville quite literally break open to reveal their inner selves, a world of color, flowers, curtains, and other gentle flourishes of a welcoming city come to life as the sextet of Donnas Anna and Elvira, Zerlina, Masetto, Don Ottavio and Leporello celebrate in song.

      A new life is promised by all—although I worry a bit, given her new-found hatred of men and her still strong sexual libido, what Donna Elvira might do in a convent or, given his previous ribald adventures, how Leporello might influence a new master, or even how long it might still take for Donna Anna to get used to the idea that the world been ridden of Giovanni before she might marry her ever-loving Ottavio. I trust only that Zerlina and Masetto will enjoy the good dinner they have planned for themselves.

 

Los Angeles, May 26, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

Karol Chwierut | Kolorowy Obrazek (Colorful Picture) / 2020

runaway

by Douglas Messerli

 

Karol Chwierut, Adrianna Fal, Ewelina Hamulczuk, and Jakub Ormaniec (screenplay), Karol Chwierut (director) Kolorowy Obrazek (Colorful Picture) / 2020 [20 minutes]

 

Two affable young gay men, Kacper (Jakub Ormaniec) and Michał (Karol Sajnok) wake up with the alarm in the bed they share together as a couple. Kacper is obviously the more outgoing of the two, immediately trying to rise his friend, turning on the radio as loudly as possible so that Michał must get up simply to tell him to shut it down. They might be kicked out of their apartment, he suggests, particularly since their door has just been terribly graffitied over with the words: “Faggots to Gas Chambers.”

     The synopsis warns us that the events of the film “are inspired by the current situation of the LGBTQ community in Poland,” so we know that despite the next quite pleasant few moments, in which Kacper dresses and runs off to work, and Michał, an artist, attempts without success to create a new work of art, we are in for some terrifying events.

       Yet when Kacper returns home and they eat, nothing seems to be that terribly amiss. Michał has attempted to clear off the door but cannot remove a spot until an elderly neighbor woman brings him a cleaning liquid which immediately removes the graffiti, she telling him that one of her family members is also gay, and she has come to accept it.

      In the middle of the night Michał realizes what he wants to paint, a portrait of his companion, which he is certain will help get him into the Academy of Fine Arts. So Kacper poses, first in the nude and then in various parts of clothing mugging the entire time while his lover paints.

       During some of their fun and games, Kacper asks how he might feel about going to New York, but basically his conversation seems to be about another friend, and Michał ignores the comment.

       Meanwhile, the local thugs, sports boys back from a soccer match, sing ugly songs beneath their apartment window. Always the joker, Kacper takes up a bucket of slops and throws it down upon them, they swearing to get even. Michał is troubled, but Kacper puts on the record player and insists his lover dance with him in to a slow jazz piece.

       That evening Kacper asks Michał “What’s your plan, you know, for life.” Michał answers simply: “Life? Life is simple. I want to wake in the morning, and go to sleep at night, and in between to exactly what I want to do. In my case it’s painting.”

       But Kacper has other plans, certain if nothing else he wants to “Definitely to leave this place,” since, he declares, “I want to a lot of things that don’t make sense.”

       The painting is almost finished and Kacper has some good news that he has been accepted for an internship that is important. The two share an Italian meal made by Michał, enjoying themselves as they talk about their plans for the next few days, which turns into the beginning of an argument with Kacper revealing the internship is in New York, arguing that they’ll live on the 34th floor of a wonderful apartment building.

         Michał feels betrayed that the issues has been fully discussed within, and besides he’s just about to apply to the Academy, his life is “here” in Poland.

        But we already know their life is going to altered in other ways as we watch the thugs pull up in cars, pull out their weapons, and move in on their apartment. And before the boys can even comprehend what has happened the two thugs are upon them, one slugging but holding back Michał as the second goes for Kacper with a bat, bloodying him and seeming to drown him in a pail of slops before finally leaving. The screen goes black with silence.

       It is a week later. We see Michał wake up alone in their bed, witnessing the badly bruised or broken ribs he must daily bind and the huge bruise under his eye and moves deeply into his cheek.

       In the next frame he is at the Academy, painting in hand when the phone rings. It is clearly Kacper asking how it went, Michał responding that he’s still waiting for the interview. When is he coming back? In response we hear Kacper saying that having been in hospital for days means he has a lot to catch up on, after all a job in New York has to be deserved.

      “Call me any time you can,” answers Michał, “and don’t forget me.”

       Michał Jabloński is called for his interview. He puts on a smile and enters the room.

       The film plays a loud rock song, the titles announcing that in Poland over 100 counties are so-called “LGBT free zones,” That’s one-third of Poland where anything to do with LGBT equality is now not allowed.”

       A bigot in front of crowd is lamenting, apparently about LGBT people, “Today they are trying to push us and our children into a different ideology.” When an ideology comes from a textbook that sexualizes young children, he argues, “I say no! I say no to my grandchildren being raised this way.” In the background we see a large paper LGBT rainbow being burned. “They are not people but an ideology.”

       Another woman says that she would give advice to young people, leave Poland. “It’s not going to be better. It’s going to get worse.” The Kanye West song ends, “Run away as fast as you can.”

       This excellent short is less a film about homophobia as it is a story about how LGBT individuals are being forced to immigrate from their own country. Presumably things in the US are not in any way as terrible as it is now in Poland…and other countries such as Hungary and of course Russia, the remnants of the Soviet world which have never quite been able to fully embrace full democracy and open points of view, and certainly sexual differences.

        Sadly, it reminded me somewhat of scenes now happening throughout the USA.

 

Los Angeles, August 26, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2022).

Patrice Chéreau | L'homme blessé (The Wounded Man) / 1983

a ballet of sexual obsession and ecstasy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Patrice Chéreau and Hervé Guibert (screenplay), Patrice Chéreau (director) L'homme blessé (The Wounded Man) / 1983

 

 One of the most significant and yet elusive gay films of the 1980s, perhaps of all time, Patrice Chéreau’s The Wounded Man remains a difficult movie to view, either in a theater or on DVD. Scenes from and discussions of it abound, but it’s not until you’ve witnessed the entire film that you comprehend just how spellbinding and amazing it is that as an LGBTQ film won the César Award for Best Writing and was entered into the 1983 Cannes Film Festival.

      Although Americans, at least those very few who saw it, in 1983 had the raw talent of Arthur J. Bressan’s almost unthinkable exploration of man-boy love in Abuse, the British were still elliptically tiptoeing around gay sexuality in Terence Davies’ Death and Transfiguration, while the Canadians of that year were quietly being shocked by Norman McLaren’s tacit declaration of his sexuality in the ballet Narcissus. The Japanese, at least, were strongly inferring that one of their war-time heroes was tortured by his repressed homosexuality in Nagisa Ōshima’s Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence and German director Rosa von Praunheim was, as always, far ahead of all the others in exploring transgender sex through the queer-punk opera City of Lost Souls; but no one but French were privy to Chéreau’s intense ballet of homosexual obsession.

      Indeed, discussing The Wounded Man in terms of ballet might be the best way to explain it. How else to describe the sudden mad packing of all of Henri’s (Jean-Hugues Anglade) family as they hurry off, hours early, to the French railway station in a provincial city. One might think from the overanxious behavior of the domineering mother (Annick Alane) that the entire family were suddenly traveling to Frankfurt, but the trip will be made only by the perplexed daughter (Sophie Edmond), more disturbed by having to leave her boyfriend behind than anything else. They rush via bus and tram to the station only to sit down in the railway waiting room for the hours to pass before her train finally arrives.

      Only Henri refuses to sit still. Filled with adolescent energy and curiosity, he explores the confines of the station as an animal let loose for the first time in his life, encountering an entire world he never before knew existed.

      As Gary M. Kramer writes in City Gay News: “At a train station to see his sister…off, he wanders around, almost dazed, catching the eyes of various men, including Bosmans (Roland Bertin),” with whom he plays almost a game of cat-and-mouse. We wanders in and out of spaces, from time to time, catching the eyes of his always attendant mother, but mostly escaping for what seems for the first time in his life, her constant gaze. Terribly timid yet totally feral, Henri goes where no others will tred.

     As Sarah Fensom, writing Film Slate, summarizes it, “As he descends a winding stairway into a public bathroom, a gaggle of young men rush past him in the other direction. ‘Beat it—don’t stay here,’ one implores, as the sounds of a man moaning in pain are heard in the background. But Henri keeps going and finds Jean (Vittorio Mezzogiorno) beating an older male client, Bosmans. Jean, a handsome hustler with a perverse understanding of the desires of others, passionately kisses Henri before asking him to retrieve money from the pockets of his victim. Henri throws himself onto the floor at Jean’s request, only to find him gone a few tumultuous seconds later.”

 

     But in those few seconds it is as if suddenly all of the virgin boy’s long closeted feelings burst into full emotional force. And for the rest of the long cinematic ballet, he wanders in search of Jean, the scruffy pimp and small-time hustler Adonis.

      At first, leaving his parents’ home for what appears to be forever, a clue of which we had in the very scene when he also packed a suitcase while his mother packed his sister’s, Henri returns to the station in search of Jean, and literally moves into that world of hustlers, travelers, and true perverts who come there is search of Jean and his boys. I’d love to see someone like Claire Denis choreograph them into motion; but Chéreau gets close.

     Jean is both delighted and spooked by the boy’s attention. No matter how much he preaches hate and disgust, Jean is also openly in love with kid, perhaps himself once similarly obsessed, and refuses to involve Henri in any of the worst of his nefarious plots. He does attempt to rid himself of the boy by hooking him up with desperate client, a working man (Claude Berri) who, when Henri attempts to bolt, locks the door and insists he least let him touch him. A bit like the naïve would-be hooker Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy (1969), Henri finally, more out of fear than anger, beats the man simply to get the key to the door and the money he has promised to Jean.

     But back at the station, he finds nearly everyone gone, and now hungry and simply worn out, he accepts dinner with Bosman who reveals Jean’s whereabouts.

     When finally Jean meets up with Henri again he cannot resist taking him home to his female lover like a stray dog or cat he can’t shake. His sometime female companion, Elisabeth (Lisa Kreuzer), is almost as obsessed by Jean as is Henri, and has even a more difficult time of waiting for him at their small apartment. She is justifiably angry that now, after finally having shown up after days of absence, Jean has brought along another of his young male lovers. But as Jean explains, Henri is different. Although both invite him to share their bed, Henri, in his still innocent haze, prefers to remain on the couch to watch them undress and engage in sex, his wide, doe-like eyes taking in every movement of their body, and every muscle and bone of Jean’s physique. Under the focus of Chéreau’s camera lens, Henri doesn’t have to engage in sex; his eyes have already embraced him into a deep caress.

     In the morning, Elisabeth having left the bed, Jean finally invites Henri in for what the boy really wants; but he is still too shy to oblige even his own desires. Jean tries to take him into his confidence, pretending he is actually a policeman, awarding the boy a gift of a knife, but Henri realizes that he has nothing to offer him in exchange.

     Jean quickly dashes off again. After carefully dressing up in the clothes Jean has left behind, Henri now becomes a visual imitation of the man he desires, walking around the station as if he were Jean, the young hustlers taking in the transformation and wondering what to make of it.

     Hours, even days pass again with any sign of Jean, as Henri grows dirtier and remains half-undressed. At one point Henri becomes so desperate that he attempts to hustle a handsome male traveler, who quickly turns him away. Finally, at wit’s end, Henri offers a handsome Algerian (Hammou Graïa) all the money his has left just for a kiss. Together they make a sad pas de deux around the station attempting to find a private spot, out of sight of others. But unable to find such a place, they give up and engage in a public kissing session that is one of the most truly erotic moments of the film.

     In between his endless dance, Henri attempts to return home, where both times he is quickly sent away with disdain; he tries to buy a ticket to visit his sister in Frankfurt, although it is not clear that he even knows her address; in any event he doesn’t have enough money.

      Finally, he meets up again with Bosman, who agrees to take him home for a good meal and to tell him where Jean is. They first stop at a spot where heterosexual couples come to have sex in their cars, the perverted Bosman explaining the joys of just listening to the “normality” of the world, which reminds me a little of Humbert Humbert’s sudden realization of the sounds of normal life going on around him which he could never again provide for Lolita.

     When Bosman takes him to his mansion, Henri finds Jean there, holing up, evidently, after one of his petty criminal activities has gone amiss. Bosman orders the two to have sex, and Jean seems to be willing to comply as Henri awaits in almost breathless anticipation, both terrorized and trembling in preparation for what he has so long sought out. But even here, in the castle of the monstrous voyeur, who slips back in to watch over the proceedings, Jean reveals his true love of the boy, although stripping and appearing to engage in lustful sex, only imitating the acts, sucking his own thumb in pretense of engaging in oral sex with the waiting Henri. Later, with an almost wistful longing, Henri asks him why he had pretended to have sex.

    There are further wanderings, further dances and partners, including a revisit to Elisabeth and a return to Bosman’s private gay club before the film moves toward closure. But by the time Henri has reached the point where Bosman gives full access to Jean’s half passed-out and drugged body.

     Henri has become something like a wounded beast, so desperate for love and a release of his pent-up desires that after stripping and joining Jean in bed for sex, he goes wild, raping and ravaging the man of his dreams as he finally chokes him and beats Jean’s head against the wall several times in an orgasm as he fucks his god. He has apparently killed him; but by this time Henri is beyond rationality. Taking a couple of Jean’s pills left on a table beside the bed, he joins him once more, hugging him close to his body without seemingly even realizing what he has done.

     Yet, finally we have the suspicion, since Bosman asks Henri to try not to wake him up, that Bosman or others have already killed Jean with the drugs, and Henri, in his grand introduction to sexual orgasm has merely fucked a dead man. And, surely, what we have just witnessed is the very opposite of Snow White.

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

Mikio Naruse | 女が階段を上る時 (Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki) (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs) / 1960, USA 1963

ascending into descent

by Douglas Messerli

 

Ryuzo Kikushima (screenplay), Mikio Naruse (director) 女が階段を上る時 (Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki) (When a Woman Ascends the Stairs) / 1960, USA 1963

 

At the center of Miko Naruse’s painful story about Tokyo Ginza nightclubs and the modern Geisha wo service them is a beautiful widow, Keiko, who, since she manages the other girls and refuses to go home with her clients, is lovingly named “Mama.” But while she may be a motherly type, Keiko (Hideko Takamine) knows precisely how to please her customers, carefully stroking their egos while they buy her some unwanted, but necessary—given that alcohol pays for the club’s survival—drinks.

     Some of the girls go home with the customers or promise sexual favors for patronage; Keiko, however, who has buried a letter in her husband’s burial urn, remains, despite her financial needs, determined that she will not give herself sexually to others. Unlike many of the other women, Keiko ascends the staircase to the upstairs bar each evening with dread, before entering with a friendly smile on her face.

     On the other hand, things are not going well at the small bar where she works, and she and her financial manager, Kinichi Komatsu (Tatsuya Nakadai) are scolded by the bar’s owner (Kyū Sazanka) for their inability to keep customers, some of whom have moved over to a nearby bar opened by a previously employee, Yuki (Keiko Awaji). Yuri’s bar has become the new hot spot, a bustling place where the geisha’s wear more contemporary clothing and more openly flirt wit their customers than in Keiko’s more traditional place.

     The seemingly straight-laced Kenichi assures “Mama,” however, that if they were to lose their jobs, she would still be so beloved that she could easily find a new bar, and Keiko continues to attract loyal customer in men like Nobuhiko Fujiski (Masayuki Mori) and Matsukichi Sekine (Dasuke Katō)—in part because she remains chaste and traditionally dressed, although the kimonos wears cost her a great part of her paychecks.

   In fact, we soon discover, most of the girls have a hard time, given the cost of clothing, perfume, and boarding, of even breaking even, despite the fact that they make higher wages than women working in factories or noodle shops. For Keiko, moreover, it is even worse given the fact that her mother has no income and her brother, whose wife has left him, has been involved in some unspoken crime and is being threatened with imprisonment. His son, moreover, having been crippled by polio, needs an operation if he is to begin school.

     The only real hope for these hapless women, before they lose their beauty, is that they might find someone willing to marry them, despite their occupation. Or, they might, like Yri, be able to find patrons willing to help them open up their own bars.

    Keiko, with the help of the loyal Kenichi and a woman confidant, Junko, explores the latter possibility, going to far as to approach some of her customers to ask them to make a financial pledge to help her, to be paid back, in future months, in the form of free drinks. With a male friend, she even searches out a new space, but is troubled when she that the upstairs bars share bathroom facilities with a cheap sushi shop below it. She goes as far as consulting a fortune-teller, who suggest that instead of rushing into the deal that she be more patient and wait.

    Soon after, she meets up with her former employee Yuri, who, over tea admits that the success of her new bar is all a sham, and that she is unable to pay back her creditors. She tells Keiko of a plot in which she will fake her suicide in order to keep her creditors at aby; but the very next day, Keiko discovers that Yuri has, in fact, really died, having either contemplated death or taken her sleeping pills with too much alcohol. When she visits Yuri’s family in mourning, she is horrified to see some of her former customers who have helped Yuri, now dunning Yuri’s poverty-stricken mother. She challenges the worst of them, Minobe, for his brutality. After Kenichi chastises her for her public behavior, Keiko angrily refuses to comply, heavily drinking in response.

     Moments later, she begins to vomit up blood, and is diagnosed with a peptic ulcer, forced to stay away from work for a few weeks. She escapes to her brother’s house, clearly located in a slum. But even there, a former client, Sekine attempts to visit her, and she realizes that she must return to work in order to help her brother and her young nephew.

     At the bar again, Sekine finally proposes to Keiko, and even though she remains unattracted to him, sees their marriage as the only possible way out of her situation. A telephone call from the man’s wife, however, reveals that it is all a fraud, that he has no money and, quite obviously, is already married; the wife admits that the has played the same trick on women previously.

      Angry and bitter about her situation, Keiko turns to liquor once again, leaving, observed by  her manager, with the one man she truly loves, the married Fujisaki. Upon driving her home, Fujisaki suddenly turns on her and rapes her; but because of her love, Keiko is strangely pleased for the turn of events, hoping perhaps that he might leave his wife and marry her. Fujisaki, however, reveals that he is soon moving to Osaka, and that he is a coward, unable to leave his wife and family.

     Furious over her abandonment of her high ideals, Kenichi expresses his disappointment of her, particularly when Keiko pretend that she has never loved Fujisaki. When Keiko falls into a fit of crying, however, he realizes that she has really loved the man and perceives her utter despair. For the first time he admits his love and admiration for her, offering himself in marriage, but Keiko declines, arguing that they know each other too well. Given the rejection, the loyal Kenichi resigns.

      The film ends with the memorable jazz renditions of composer Toshiro Mayuzumi’s score, while Keiko once again, briefly pausing, ascends the staircase to her bar, a smile pasted across her face.

      Although Mikio Naaruse’s sophisticated soap opera certainly calls up the many films ab out the same topic by the great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi, When a Woman Ascends a Staircase seems for more personal, focused as it is on the life of a single woman, than Mizoguchi’s more socially-concerned films about prostitution. And while the same themes of patriarchal domination and the pitiable social conditions of working Japanese women arise, there is something more hopeful and modern about Naruse’s still quite bleak tale.

     Keiko appears to be such an indomitable force that we can only hope that she still may find someone to love or, at the very least, find a way to open her own bar, freeing herself rom the indentured position in which, at film’s end, she remains. Yet, at the bottom of our stomachs, we cannot help but fear that, given her age, “Mama” has so very little time to make those vast cultural shifts that she will have no choice but continue mounting those stairs even when her legs can no longer take her there.

    I find Naruse’s film one of the most memorable of works I have ever seen.

 

Los Angeles, November 22, 2015

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (November 2016).