Portrait of Madame Yuki

Michiyo Kogure

Kenji Mizoguchi's Portrait of Madame Yuki is a lacerating melodrama from 1950. Another of Mizoguchi's woeful tales of beleaguered females, Yuki stars Michiyo Kogure as an aristocratic woman brought down by her vulgar and cruel husband. Eijiro Yanagi plays the husband with a pungent ferociousness, dominating a movie filled with passive, self-loathing characters. Yoshiko Kuga plays Hama, an innocent servant girl who is initially delighted to be employed in a grand home, but soon finds that it functions as a well appointed prison for her mistress. Yuki's husband treats her dismissively, lavishing his time and money on his mistress in Kyoto. Soon, the family fortune is spent and Yuki has to pivot and turn her lakeside house into a hotel. Even this desperate act goes for naught and Yuki opts for self-annihilation in a watery grave.

Mizoguchi stresses Yuki's lack of privacy in her own home. Everything she does is surveilled, even when she is ravished by her husband in the film's most shocking sequence. Despite, or because of,  her abode's sliding screens, blinds, and curtains, Yuki's daily humiliations are exposed for all to see. Her former tutor loves her, but he turns out to be too much of an inhibited prig to truly aid Yuki. He, like all of the characters, is unsure of where he fits in a Japan split between modernity and its feudal legacy. Yuki's husband decries Japan's democratization and yearns for the feudal past, but he and his mistress ape Western fashion and behavior in the most craven way possible. In opposition, Yuki and the tutor favor traditional attire and decorum, but yearn for the freedom that the democratization of Japan promises, particularly the opportunity for divorce. The tutor is a koto master, but can also play a Western style rhapsody on the piano. Similarly, Fumio Hayasaka's score mixes Western and Japanese motifs. Hayasaka, one of Mizoguchi and Kurosawa's key collaborators, died a tragically premature death from tuberculosis at the age of 41 in 1955.

Portrait of Madame Yuki suffers from the melodramatic strictures of its source novel. The heroine is so masochistic that I wanted to cry out "suffering succotash" every ten minutes or so. Ms. Kogure's performance seemed more studied than felt to me. Most of the supporting characters, particularly the mistress and juvenile male servant, are too one-dimensional. Still, if this is not Mizoguchi at his absolute best, there are many moments in Portrait of Madame Yuki that are both scarifying and sublime. The rape sequence, Hama enjoying her mistress' luxurious bath, and the finale in which Yuki drifts away to eternity into the lakeside mists. Currently streaming on Tubi.