The Life of Oharu (Japan’s Golden Age of Cinema)

In collaboration with the Japan Foundation and the Japanese Embassy in Luxembourg

The Life of Oharu

Saikaku ichidai onna Japon 1952 | Kenji Mizoguchi | vostEN | 136' | digital | Cast : Kinuyo Tanaka, Toshiro Mifune, Hisako Yamane, Jukichi Uno

► Competition, Venice Film Festival 1932

In feudal Japan, Oharu, the daughter of royal samurai Shinzaemon, secretly has a passionate romance with Katsunosuke, a man with a low social standing. When they are found out, Katsunosuke is put to death and Oharu and her family are banished from the kingdom. Destitute and disgraced, Shinzaemon sells Oharu into prostitution, and she spends years searching for love.

« Mizoguchi's limpid heartbreaker is also a fierce denunciation of the subjugation of women, the power of wealth, and Japan's unjust though splendid traditions. » (The New Yorker).

« The Holy Grail of Japanese Cinema. This portrait of a 17th-century woman’s repeated humiliation by her patriarchal society is devastating from beginning to end, but its genius is not so much Mizoguchi’s caustic criticism of a money-obsessed society’s refusal to acknowledge its accountability for her degradation, but that Mizoguchi uses Oharu’s life to peel back the layers of the physical self and reveal the soul that lies bruised beneath. » (Slant Magazine)