A Film Canon

Unlike Sisters Of The Gion and Osaka Elegy, The Story Of The Last Chrysanthemum takes a male protagonist, but pairs him with a stylistic reconfiguration that undermines everything implicit in that role. For the first time, Mizoguchi almost exclusively uses long takes and shots, during which the camera frequently strays away from the action proper and, in some cases, deliberately conceals or marginalises it. This clarifies Kikunosuke (Shotar Hanayagi), adopted son of the renowned actor Kikuno (Gonjuro Kawarasaki), as a mere absence, his increasingly unsuccessful theatrical career imbuing him with the anonymity of a kabuki mask, albeit without the orienting backdrop of the stage. When medium-shots do occur, they tend to dwell on women, depicting men in profile or from behind, thereby reinforcing the sense that the drama is occurring behind their backs; or, more accurately, in a backstage universe. Hence the paradoxical quality of the recurrent tracking-shots, whose expansive fluidity just clarifies this pervasive interiority, most explicitly in a shot that tracks Kikunosake's progress along a street from the back rooms of its various houses, but most poetically in a shot taken from behind a lattice balcony, moving with a rapidity that distils the wooden slats into the elusive presence that the male characters seem to lack. The result is a subtle revision of the kabuki aesthetic, according to which it can only retain its dignity if it escape the confines of the stage - explaining the unusual, dislocating brevity with which the two performances are shot - and, more specifically, if its participants open their personal lives up to those factors that produce everyday anonymity; that is, experience the world as women: "Being a great actor is not only to be good at technique".