Gion bayashi aka A Geisha (DVDrip - 1953)
Japanese | Subtitles: English and Spanish .srt | 81 min | Xvid 544x400 | 1111 kb/s | 88 kb/s vbr mp3 | 25 fps | B-VOP | 700 mb + 3% recovery
Genre: Drama | RS.com + ftp2share mirrors
After taking on 16-year-old Eiko (Ayako Wakao) as an apprentice, geisha Miyoharu (Michiyo Kogure) and her new protégé find their positions compromised by men (Seizaburô Kawazu and Kanji Koshiba) who demand more than geisha traditionally provide.
Mizoguchi's
A Geisha, unlike many other Mizoguchi films, is set in its own time, 1953, in Kyoto, though it shares with the director's period films the quality of being incredibly beautiful without being particularly, foolishly pretty.
The story is about the friendship of two women, Miyoharu (Michiyo Korgure), an older geisha bound by a tradition that no longer holds, and Eiko (Ayako Wakao), a 16-year-old girl whom Miyoharu agrees to sponsor and train as a geisha after the death of Eiko's mother, a former geisha who'd been Miyoharu's friend. Though Mizoguchi's film makes only two quick trips outside Kyoto's tea houses and geisha houses, the film is as much about the social revolution taking place in 1953 occupied Japan as it is about the emotional relationship between the two women.
From the beginning, it's apparent that the young Eiko is not going to be a conventional, subservient geisha. After a class in which the teacher has told her pupils that the geisha is a work of art, like Noh drama and the tea ceremony, Eiko wonders whether the new Japanese constitution doesn't guarantee a geisha the right to say no to a patron. The other young women giggle, but Eiko is serious.
It's evidence of the system of balances that always operate in a Mizoguchi film that as Eiko is wondering about the geisha's constitutional rights, the geisha's role is being corrupted. In postwar Japan, the geisha, who had once been a highly skilled entertainer, was being called upon with increasing frequency to perform the duties of the not necessarily skilled prostitute.
It's a trend that the older Miyoharu resists, more or less passively, while Eiko does battle. When her would-be patron takes the two women on a trip to Tokyo, Eiko refuses to perform the duties she does in the teahouse. "I serve at parties," she says. "I'm a lady."
This doesn't put off the man. He makes a lunge at her, wrestles her to the floor, plants a big kiss on her mouth, to which Eiko responds by biting his lip so badly the fellow has to be hospitalized. Because of the scandal, the two women are blackballed by all of Kyoto's teahouses. Miyoharu is confused, worried, though she doesn't blame the younger woman. Says Eiko, in effect, "If that's what being a geisha means, then I don't want it."
The charm of
A Geisha is the compassionate but completely unsentimental way it regards the two women's friendship, as well as the manner in which this friendship changes and deepens as their responsibilities, each to the other are acknowledged. Miyoharu is much the more interesting of the two, but it is the younger Eiko who is more often right.
Though the landscape of the film is restricted to a small, rather exotic quarter in Kyoto,
A Geisha is far from esoteric. The scope is narrow and the focus is deep. The two actresses who dominate the film are splendid, as are several other performers, especially Chieko Naniwa, who plays the not unkind but money-minded doyenne of Kyoto's geishas, and Eitaro Shindo, who plays Eiko's father.
A Geisha is actually a remake, being based on a film Mr. Mizoguchi made in 1936 that, to my knowledge, has never been released here, yet the 1953 version is far from being dated. One can say that the best, most intelligent film about women to be seen here in the last 12 months was a film made 25 years ago.
Vincent Canby, NY Times, June 1, 1978Los músicos de GionEn el Kioto de los años 50, la geisha Miyoharu acoge en su casa del barrio de Gion a Eiko, una chica de 16 años que desde ese momento pasa a ser una maiko (aprendiz de geisha). En su debut como geisha, Eiko muerde al cliente, por negarse a ir más allá de lo que son las obligaciones de una geisha, por lo que ella y Miyoharu se ven forzadas a abandonar Gion.
Hermosa película del maestro Mizoguchi.
English subtitles by yours truly.
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