The Red Line Reflecting the Dying Night - Kenji Mizoguchi's Last Works and a Group of Actresses (1956)

The Red Line Reflecting the Dying Night - Kenji Mizoguchi's Last Works and a Group of Actresses (1956)

Kenji Mizoguchi's last film, "Red-light District" (1956), was released during the controversy in the Diet over the Anti-Prostitution Law. The film takes place in the red-light district of Yoshiwara, Tokyo, and portrays a group of prostitutes living in a bar called "Yume no Sato". Yorie is a prostitute who longs to be an ordinary housewife, but goes bankrupt, while Hanae struggles with an ill husband and a young child. Yasumi, played by Fumiko Wakao, is both uninhibited and lonely, while Micky, played by Machiko Kyo, is portrayed as a bearer of postwar American military culture. Michiyo Kigure supports the story with her calm and melancholy performance as Hanai, and the actresses' performances form a multilayered work. At the time of the film's release, the Anti-Prostitution Law was enacted in 1956 and went into effect the following year, with criminal penalties starting in 1958. Mizoguchi's film portrays women standing between the law and reality head-on, bringing the contrad
ictions of postwar Japanese society into sharp relief. Director of Photography Kazuo Miyagawa's vertical compositions reflected the boundary between society and the individual, and Toshiro Mayuzumi's music emphasized the fluctuations. The director died the year of its release, leaving this film as his last work. The Red-light District" was the pinnacle of postwar Japanese film realism, and with the presence of its actresses, it will go down in the annals of Japanese film history.