Street Of Shame

Kenji Mizoguchi’s last film is a heartfelt exposé of institutionalized prostitution in Japan, one which objects to the practice  less on intrinsic moral grounds than as the result of the parlous state of women in post-war Japan.

The film portrays the lives of a group of five prostitutes in the red light district of Toyko as the Japanese parliament considers a bill to outlaw the trade. The women with the exception of  'Mickey' (Machiko Kyo who played the ghost in Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu,1953) despise the work but because of poverty and debt have no choice. Only the ruthless Yasumi (Ayako Wakao) has a strategy to escape her situation.

Mizoguchi creates a diverse range of characters who have varying back-stories but at heart all are selling their bodies against their will (or in Mickey’s case as an act of revenge) and, in one way or another, because of men. Mizoguchi originally intended to make a more typically documentary-like film but the mixture of social realism and narrative fiction make for a highly credible outcome. With its classic black and white visual style of the era, a combination of art direction, cinematography and mise-en-scène, an intriguingly minimalist score by Toshirô Mayuzumi and a somewhat melodramatic tone the film is a front-runner for inclusion amongst “women’s films” of the period as is Mizoguchi's thematically-related Her Mother's Profession (1954) at the same time as it tellingly captures a moment in Japan's social history.

 

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