By David Melville
Translator: Yi Ersan
Proofreader: Qin Tian
Source: Senses of Cinema (July 2005)
At first glance, "Yang Guifei" (1955) looks like an Asian version of Laura Montes, a masterpiece by Max Obers that same year. It is a gorgeous colorful fantasy (half history, half Cinderella story) about a young woman from a miserable background who captures the heart of the monarch.
Laura Montes Laura Montes
Of course, this is a historical fairy tale without an "always happy" ending. In both films, the rapid rise of our heroine plunges society into chaos and open revolt. Poor Laura ended her life in the circus's deformed show; the unfortunate Yang Guifei used her life to repay the favor.
While the two films have similar appearances, their heroines (and their emotions) are very different. Laura, played by Martini Carlo, is a vulgar and empty female adventurer who has no emotion other than greed. Her meteoric rise and dizzying fall are prime examples of moral decay in 19th-century Europe, and Ofels did not want viewers to waste any tears over her fate.
However, in Mizoguchi's eyes, Yang Guifei (Kyo Machiko), who has changed from a kitchen maid to a royal favorite, is like a lily blooming on a dung heap in the 8th century Tang Dynasty. Forced by a greedy family to become a prostitute, her love for Tang Xuanzong (Senyazhi) is completely real and she willingly sacrifices her life to keep him on the throne.
Yang Guifei is not so much a ruthless slut as a victim. Kyo Machiko's Yang Guifei continues the tradition of other heroines in Mizoguchi's works: the infamous aristocrat in Nishizuru Ichigo (1952), or the prostitute in his last film, The Red Line. Women have strong convictions, but their emotions are stronger.
Sadly, they are all imprisoned in a world where principles and emotions are luxuries. Born into a poor family, Kenji Mizoguchi witnessed his sister Shoushou being sold as a geisha as a child. After his mother's death, teenage Mizoguchi fled his home and took refuge with his sister. As he experienced, he understood that love is a luxury and shame is the price of survival.
The Daughter of the West Crane Generation (1952)
In Kenji Mizoguchi's film career, only the story of "Yang Guifei" takes place in a non-Japanese environment. The concept of "exoticism"—a traditional barrier between most Western audiences and most Asian films—is a double problem in Yang Guifei. Perhaps, the world of ancient China is as "strange" to Kenji Mizoguchi as it is in our eyes. Is it this weird and unfamiliar dimension that sets this film apart in style from Kenji Mizoguchi's other works? Western film critics, including Penelope Houston, praised him for his "ability to imagine the continuity between the past and the present in the course of history that we do not feel when we consciously experience history."
Indeed, just look at "Yang Guifei". In this film — and all of a sudden, without any trailer — "It's an ancient strange country: they behave differently than we do."
Mizoguchi broke away from his habitual world and entered a vibrant kingdom of color, with sets and scene scheduling that differed from all of his works (including one of his few other color films, The Story of Shinhei, a realist work shot late in 1955). When Yang Guifei met the emperor in the imperial garden, the flashy artificial set exuded a delicate paleness—as if the entire scene was carved from mother-of-pearl.
Rather than targeting any historical realism, Yang Guifei is reminiscent of a distant and illusory ancient China, like Carlo Gozi's play or Giacomo Puccini's opera Turandot.
In the hands of second-rate directors, this orientalist visual effect may slip into dangerous vulgarity. However, the artificiality of "Yang Guifei" is not only the style of the film, but also its content. Neither the family's ambitions nor court etiquette allowed Yang Guifei and Tang Xuanzong to have any moment of honesty or undefendedness.
The intense and sincere love between them (almost) came at the expense of his throne and (ultimately) the sacrifice of her life. On the one hand, there was external pressure, and on the other hand, Tang Xuanzong's favor for Yang Guifei also contained a powerful illusion (if not creepy). At first, he fell in love with the obscure girl because she resembled a portrait of his deceased wife.
This particular plot twist takes Yang Guifei out of the solemn conventions of many historical legends and into the gloomy world created in Preminger's The Secret History of Laura (1944), Diater's Portrait of Jenny (1948), Hitchcock's Ecstasy (1958) and Lynch's Night's Night Panic (1996). Whether intentional or not, these films are a reimagining (if not a practical retelling) of the story of Orpheus and Eurydice in Greek mythology.
Similarly, in "Yang Guifei", Kenji Mizoguchi is also based on the Japanese legend that men fall in love with beautiful ghosts. He had already explored this theme in his most famous work, The Tale of the Rainy Moon (1953), in which Masayuki Sen played the humble potter Genjuro, while Kyo machiko (painted with a white face and wearing a flowing white robe) played the seductive ghost Wakasa. Kenji Mizoguchi chose the same two actors— even though they played completely different roles — to create a haunting, subtle, and illusory atmosphere for the romance of Yang Guifei, so much so that we felt that this royal romance was doomed to failure before it even began.
The Tale of the Rainy Moon (1953)
Despite stylistic contrasts with Kenji Mizoguchi's other works, Yang Guifei is perhaps the purest and most powerful sublimation of his world— described by V.F. Perkins as "a place of fleeting joy and enduring sadness." It's also a film full of sexuality and death, which coincides with its Orphean connection.
When Yang Guifei came out of the bath, Kenji Mizoguchi cut from a close-up view of her nude to the (more sexy) ripples on the surface of the water. As she walked toward the place where she had been executed by the rebels, Mizoguchi once again made a clever cut—from the hanging to a close-up—and her jewels fell at her feet one by one. At the heart of this short-lived but lasting visual pleasure is sadness.