Critics reviews

Mizoguchi builds psychological tension through his use of long takes, saving close-ups for moments of portent or heightened emotion—as in the final shot, which shows his headstrong young victim of Japan's clash between modernism and tradition down but still fighting mad.

From its long opening tracking shot of a mansion where a bankrupt family's goods are being auctioned off to the final, harrowing climax, Mizoguchi's tale of two geisha sisters - one rebelling against her fate at the hands of fickle men, the other more conservative and accepting - is a bleak, enormously astute and affecting account of the physical, emotional and economic entrapment of women in traditional Japanese society.

The masterpiece of Kenji Mizoguchi's prewar period, a subtle and compact film (1936) that locates Mizoguchi's concern with the transitions of Japanese society in a conflict between two geisha sisters...