The Story Of The Last Chrysanthemum

The booklet included with the Criterion Collection's release of director Kenji Mizoguchi's "The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum" describes how chief cameraman Shigeto Miki would set his lenses eight feet above the ground, so that the film might best capture the multilayered detail of production designer Hiroshi Mizutani's work. It allows for the sort of composition that would become common throughout the career of Mizoguchi -- one that rests slightly above its characters, observing them as though their lives were a tragic dance, rather than meeting them at eye level.

Mizoguchi would steadily produce films (mostly melodramas) over the following two decades (he would die suddenly at age 58, in 1956). His frames survey entire spaces instead of specific people or faces, and often last through entire scenes, without an edit or a close up. Mizoguchi also stages action in the background, initially, before slowly allowing it to enter the foreground, where further complications inevitably await.

"The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum" is staged in the Meiji era, and author Dudley Andrew astutely notes in the same essay that the architecture of that time period lent itself perfectly to Mizoguchi's eye: Its procession of "small rooms, sliding shoji, and interconnected balconies" only extend the depth of his images further.

Described by Andrew as a "film adaptation of a shinpa play taken from a novel about kabuki," "The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum" is indicative of the Mizoguchi filmography in another way: It tracks the various burdens placed onto women by the very makeup of Japanese society during specific moments in history.

Kabuki performer Kikunosuke Onoue (Shotaro Hanayagi) carries his own burden: The legacy of his father, another actor, one widely celebrated. The son can't perform, but nobody will say that to his face, save for the family's wet nurse Otoku (Kakuko Mori,) whom he immediately becomes infatuated with. Her social standing makes their match an impossibility, so they run together, the side effect being that Kikunosuke can now learn his craft the honest way. This path grants the pair a number of years together, though they're not entirely blissful; and should Kiku ever elect to return to the upper echelon of social class, then he'll undoubtedly have to go there alone.

Throughout the film, Mizoguchi trains his long shots on the kabuki performances themselves, which consistently rhyme with the domestic sequences in both narrative action and formal treatment, until the parallel lines inevitably diverge. The figure of the stage moves forward; the one behind the curtain remains behind.

Criterion's Blu-ray release of the film includes a sole extra feature: A 20-minute conversation with film scholar Philip Lopate, who analyzes "Last Chrysanthemum" via a number of different critical approaches. He considers and defends the rather passive nature of Otoku as being indicative of female psychology; he considers the theme of "collateral damage" incurred by the creation of art, and how it recurs throughout the Mizoguchi oeuvre; he discusses the way that the director's aesthetic rhythm often shifts between deliberate stillness and kinetic movement; and he connects the use of tracking shots to the art of scroll painting (he's aided in this study by clips from the film itself, and their eloquent density tends to bear out even the most grandiose comparisons.)

The piece is an insightful one, but when it comes to the release of Mizoguchi films extra features are not the primary concern. His movies have endured endless problems with regards to preservation; only 30 survive to the present day, though he directed nearly three times as many, so the mere fact of this film's restoration is worth appreciating. That the video transfer is thick with photographic textures, and accurately conveys the film's theatrical exhibition state is another major upside.

Even beyond the preservation angle, Mizoguchi's films have long been underserved on home video in the United States. Only a small handful of his extant works are currently in print domestically (Criterion have previously released seven on either DVD or Blu-ray, and that's about it). That we can now add "The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum" to that list -- one of the more rigorous distillations of the filmmaker's storied craft -- should count among the highlights of any cineaste's year.

"The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum"
Blu-ray
$39.95
Criterion.com