The care taken in the psychological depth of female characters charged with a universal and timeless significance is a key feature of some of Mizoguchi Kenji’s major works. The Lady of Musashino (1951), the second in the new film season curated by film critic and Japanese cinema expert Alexander Jacoby for Japan House London, belongs to a string of films exploring the sentimental defeat and social oppression of tragic heroines.

A fine example of the so-called ‘bourgeois melodramas’ which Mizoguchi crafted in the early 1950s, this intricate story of postwar life and relationships is another impressive star vehicle for the wonderful actress Tanaka Kinuyo in the role of Michiko, a young woman unhappily married to a university professor and who is drawn to her young yet disillusioned cousin Tsutomu, a former prisoner of war.

The personal drama is set against the backdrop of a fast-changing postwar Japan; indeed, the very landscapes among which it unfolds were soon to disappear as semi-rural Musashino was swallowed up by the Tokyo conurbation. The plot is based on a novel by Ōoka Shōhei (1909-88), also the author of the war story Nobi (Fires on the Plain), which was later to be adapted into a famous 1959-film by Ichikawa Kon.

The pathos and the degree of social criticism that will reach their climax in the later The Life of Oharu (1952) are mostly drafted in this film, but its lyrical beauty and its sure feel for time and place command attention. Critic Mark Le Fanu hails it as “an authentically rich and powerful work, serious and unrhetorical in its depiction of post-war anomie.”

The screenings are in Japanese with English subtitles. Duration: approx. 88mins

Please note that this movie is rated PG and is therefore not considered suitable for an audience younger than 8 years old unaccompanied.

Guests who are booked to attend the screening can also enjoy 10% off drinks at The Stand on their way in.

Text written in collaboration with Alexander Jacoby; image © 1951 Toho Co., Ltd.

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Booking Essential | Admission Free