Reseñas de la crítica

Kenji Mizoguchi's staggering Ugetsu is a film of many riddles and paradoxes that unfolds with the illusory simplicity of a fable. Its initial straightforwardness, as a parable against the pitfalls of human greed, is a misdirection that leads the audience into a void in which objectivity and subjectivity intermingle, hopelessly and invigoratingly clouding rationality.

Playing with light and shadow in beautiful black and white, Mizoguchi maintains a dreamlike fog even when illusions are eventually shattered.

The film's supernatural elements are rooted in the real, derived from themes of greed, love, and loss. The celebrated cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa lends the film an unsettling atmosphere with his constantly moving camera.

Mizoguchi created a personal statement on some of his favorite subjects: greed, spiritual transcendence, and women's capacity for selflessness. Formally, it is indeed close to flawless—besides the aforementioned tracking shots, the film's mise-en-scene demonstrates limitless imagination in evoking the feudal era.

The usual track when writing about Ugetsu, after giving some background by explaining how the story was adapted by Yoshikata Yoda from two Akinari Ueda short stories, is to highlight the film's moments of pure cinematic bliss. And Ugetsu is full of them. Like Ophuls and later Godard, Mizoguchi was nothing if not one of the great organizers and executors of the master tracking shot. The first 20 minutes or so of Ugetsu give only hints of the brilliance to come.

It seems odd that a composer [Fumio Hayasaka] who worked on key Mizoguchi and Kurosawa films can remain so hidden in the shadows of time. But perhaps that is a kind of poetic justice. Ugetsu, one of the greatest films ever made, is all about darkness and light, the interpenetration of fantasy and reality, and the extreme auteur symbiosis that made it all happen. Lurking in the literal and figurative netherworld is an artist who helped make Mizoguchi's masterwork mellifluous.

A movie that blends lilting fable, gritty realism and elegiac ghost story so seamlessly that you can feel its cumulative power moving right through you——like the spirits within... Because Mizoguchi understands the very human condition, the film offers a deep compassion for its characters, a few, potentially despicable. And though life is bleak and certainly cruel, Mizoguchi's inherent humanity and lyrical craftsmanship keeps his characters from being crushed outright.

No clear line of demarcation separates the realms of the real and the supernatural in Kenji Mizoguchi's 1953 masterpiece Ugetsu, and every time the director pulls out the rug, it seems freshly devastating. Though Ugetsu deserves a place among cinema's great ghost stories, its hauntings are never explicit or frightening like a horror movie; in fact, they're so subtly integrated into the narrative fabric that the film seems to exist on another plane.

It is the movie's supreme balancing act to be able to move seamlessly between the realistic and the otherworldly. Mizoguchi achieves this feat by varying the direction between a sober, almost documentary, long-distance view of mayhem and several carefully choreographed set pieces, such as the phantom ship.

In Ugetsu, the female characters are put through the wringer... But interestingly enough, it's the men who end up shouldering the emotional toll. With all due respect to Mizoguchi's mysterious, incantatory, gorgeous parable, is it this crucial variation on his approach to feminism that causes Ugetsu's pinnacular reputation in the film-critic boys' club?

The film abounds in extraordinary sequences. The long crane shot at the film's opening, establishing the setting of Genjiro's hut. The beautiful little scene in the town where Genjiro stops to admire kimonos and imagines seeing Miyagi touching them and trying them on. The interiors extravagantly materialise around Genjiro as he enters the mansion and candles are lit from room to room. The justly celebrated love scene by the shimmering lake.

The supreme demonstration of Mizoguchi's method is the scene of the murder of the heroine in Ugetsu, staged in long shot: the wounded Kinuyo Tanaka, stabbed by bandits in a quarrel over food, crawling away in the foreground, while, in the distance, the thieves squabble over the food they have robbed from her. In its juxtaposition of high tragedy and intransigent physical realism, the scene deserves the adjective Shakespearean.