Portrait Of Madame Yuki

The 1950s would be the decade that would define Kenji Mizoguchi's career with films like Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, and The Life of Oharu. His first film of the that era was Portrait Of Madame Yuki (1950), which has its merits but falls short of the classics mentioned above. I think most of this has to do with some of the facile dialogue and blustery melodrama that inhabits the film. That being said the visual aspects of the film are executed with artistry. Mizoguchi's eye for framing a scene or using movement with a crane on location shots. There are several masterly location shots that take place in Izu with the spectacular views of the ocean and surroundings that punctuate some of the more dramatic moments of the film. The film's climax is a sequence that is purely visual, Madame Yuki (Michiyo Kogure) makes her way to the lake, the mist of the morning envelopes the grass (see the still above). It is a powerful optical sequence, however, it is also theatrical in it’s description, and is filled with poetic feeling. It is an example of Mizoguchi’s masterly touch for visual compositions.  It is scenes like this that make Portrait of Madame Yuki a worthwhile film despite it's flaws. The film’s final scene takes place off screen, but it predicts a similar event visualized later on in Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff.