Rent The Woman of Rumour (1954)

Hands Clasped - The Woman of Rumour review by CH

It is a familiar story. A daughter is obliged to return to the family home after the break-up of a romance. Such is the case in Kenji Mizoguchi's A Woman of Rumour (1954).

What's more, though, the daughter (played by Yoshiko Kuba) had attempted suicide in Tokyo because her lover had ditched her after learning that her studies were funded by her mother (Kinuyo Tanaka) who... presides over a geisha premises in Kyoto.

For all the fine costumes, elaborate hair and ceremonial bows before the clientele, this amounts to a brothel. And, in her fraught state, the daughter is aghast at witnessing the spectacle of these deep-focus premises filmed in grey shades of black and white which somehow possess an inner colour. Further drama is provided not only by the daughter's growing appreciation of the women's need to avail themselves of this work but her shock at finding that her mother is in thrall to a visiting doctor (Tomoemon Otani) who duly augments his lust by hankering after both of them.

This is not to give away too much, for all becomes apparent a short way into a drama which makes the most of its ninety minutes. In a sense, the denizens of the geisha house realise that they are performing upon a stage, presenting a persona, part of an age-old ritual – as if the Bombs had not fallen upon the country some eight years earlier.

Melodrama, essentially, but with a heart which supplants the other, equally vital organs which we do not see, but in Leonard Cohen's phrase – new skin for the old ceremony – foment a film which startles and haunts us almost seventy years later.