Street of Shame

Street of Shame

Introduction

Kenji Mizoguchi makes an graceful, poignant, and hard-bitten portrait of adversity plus human resilience in Street of Shame. Employing the recurrent imagery of rectangular compositions, Mizoguchi reflects the estrangement plus social isolation of the tragic heroines: Yumeko borrows money from the calculating Yasumi throughout a small opening in a privacy screen; Mickey's interview with the proprietor is expressed through a wall opening; Yumeko avoids finding her son and watches through structural beams as Hanae sends him away; the haunting image of Yumeko singing a sad ballad by the stairs.

Discussion

Right from the opening credits, which characteristics a camera pan of a slummy part of the city set to some very strange music, as we're getting set up for the anxious and uncannily confusing lives of a group of prostitutes engaging a whorehouse. That music, and later some of the worrying lighting plus settings and photography further the notion that the lives of these women are completely outside the normal world, and are strange and unnatural ones.

Hell, at one point a scene in which the women offer farewell with present gifts to one of their own who's building the transition to married life, in which pretty much nothing out of the regular happens, is exhibited with that same threatening, surreal music, plus suddenly a scene of a apparently normal farewell takes on a almost supernatural tone. You'll watch scenes like this one disseminated during “Street of Shame,” and yet, those scenes, as well as those eerie opening credits, are kinda misleading, because when all was stated and done I was astonished at how sensible and filled with real human emotion this film was, particularly after the orgy of tragic melodrama recognized as “The Life of Oharu(Desjardins 2005 pp. 262-270).” Mizoguchi's final film might have ...