getsu is Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi's most widely heralded film and one of the couple dozen intractable stalwarts in worldwide cinema history polls, perhaps because it not only encapsulates so many of his concerns (post-WWII questions of jingoism, the plight of women trapped in patriarchy, and conversely issues of national character), but because he also folds them into a dense, fairly complicated episodic narrative, taking place during Japan's civil wars of the 16th century. (Because the storyline has what could legitimately be considered "twists," be advised that the rest of the review contains spoilers, though Mizoguchi purposefully undercuts the plot's potential surprises by foreshadowing every revelation through internal, formal echoes.)

The film's main storyline, in which a destitute potter is sidelined from his wife and child by a seductive spirit, is an adaptation of an Akinari Ueda story that has passed through cinematic memes like so many other macabre folk tales (it was even used in Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan not once, but twice: first in a rather benign form also recalling Gift of the Magi, and then in a vengeful variation espousing the value of keeping secrets that would reach American cinema in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie). Genjuro, the potter, makes an attempt to stockpile his ceramic wares into a skiff along with his doting, maternal wife Miyagi (played by Mizoguchi's own Marlene Dietrich: Kinuyo Tanaka, who also played Oharu) and young son Genichi (prepubescent and, in Mizoguchi's critique of masculinity, nearly invisible in his father's eyes) so that he can cash in at the city street market. Genjuro's sister Ohama and her husband Tobei tag along, though Tobei is far more interested in pursuing his dream of becoming a renowned samurai warrior than helping Genjuro sell his merchandise.

Adrift in the night-shrouded lake blanketed with Val Lewton-esque ruffles of fog, a seemingly abandoned boat glides up to the quintet and an emaciated near-corpse warns the men in the boat to watch out for marauding bandits and to keep a close eye on their women. In the very next scene, Genjuro is dropping his wife and child alone on the shoreline to fend for themselves because, so he says, it would be too dangerous for them in the city. He is correct, of course, but the danger in the city is directed toward him, whereas the countryside brings Miyagi almost immediate death at the end of a scavenger's spear. Because Genjuro unloads his family so swiftly at the first hint of danger, and because his peril comes accompanied by the sexual rapture he experiences with the spirit Lady Wasaka, it wouldn't be a radical leap to chart his misguided anti-domestic detour with that of Tobei, who also leaves his wife (who immediately succumbs to prostitution) to pursue his selfish, quixotic quest to become a samurai legend.

In other words, it seems as though Genjuro is already subconsciously aware of the erotic rewards of his bad judgment. Which turns the film's finale, in which Genjuro is enchanted a second time by the spirit of a dead woman (this time, his murdered wife) into a withering hip check against machismo: Genjuro's wandering hips are checked and he realizes the price of his sex folly. In Ugetsu, Mizoguchi's female characters are as always put through the wringer (even Wasaka, who would be expected to drop the painted-eyebrow façade and emerge as a malevolent demon in the final reel, is actually a crushed, tragic victim of earlier male violence, a woman who never lived long enough to experience love), but interestingly enough, it's the men who end up shouldering the emotional toll. With all due respect to Mizoguchi's mysterious, incantory, gorgeous parable, is it this crucial variation on the filmmaker's approach to feminism that causes Ugetsu's pinnacular reputation in the film critic boys' club?

DVD Review: Ugetsu