A face hollowed by time is reflected in the half-light of a Buddhist temple. Oharu, an elderly street prostitute, observes the wooden statues of the 500 Arhats, the enlightened disciples. Upon those severe and impassive effigies, her weary, hallucinating gaze projects the faces of the men who have marked her life, stages of a secular Stations of the Cross that dragged her from the imperial court to the mud of the brothel. So begins, with a prologue of sublime despair, "The Life of Oharu" (Saikaku Ichidai Onna, 1952), the work with which Kenji Mizoguchi achieves a pinnacle of stylistic purity and merciless lucidity that definitively consecrates him in the pantheon of absolute masters. The film is not a story; it is an epitaph. It is not a drama; it is a visual requiem.

The flashback structure, triggered by this epiphany in the temple, reveals a descent into the inferno that has the geometric precision of a mathematical formula and the ineluctable cruelty of a Greek tragedy. Each step in Oharu’s fall is not the result of a moral error or a weakness of character, but the direct consequence of a social system—that of feudal Japan in the Tokugawa era—that acts like a stone-crushing machine upon the individual, especially if she is a woman. Mizoguchi, adapting the 17th-century picaresque novel by Ihara Saikaku, drains it of every element of levity and adventure to transform it into a theorem on suffering. Oharu is not a sinner but a sacrificial victim, immolated on the altar of an inhuman code of honor, an architecture of misfortune in which every escape route leads to an even deeper abyss. Her first "sin" is love: a pure and reciprocated feeling for a page of lower rank, an infraction that costs him his life and her and her family their exile. From this moment, her existence becomes a commodity, her body an object to be traded, used, and ultimately discarded.

Mizoguchi's camera does not judge, nor does it participate: it observes. His celebrated style, built on famously long sequence shots and a depth of field that inscribes its characters within their environment like figures in a bas-relief, here achieves an almost transcendental power. The camera moves with the slowness and grace of a ceremony, unveiling spaces, following characters with a distance that is not coldness, but a higher form of pity. It is the gaze of History, or perhaps of an impassive God observing the unfolding of a pre-written destiny. Every frame is a universe of meaning, a pictorial composition that evokes the tradition of ukiyo-e, the "pictures of the floating world." The sliding doors, the grates, the screens are not mere scenic elements, but visual bars that fragment the space and imprison Oharu, a tangible metaphor for her condition. Mizoguchi needs no close-ups to wrench emotion from us; the protagonist's despair emerges from her posture, from the way she moves through a space that rejects her, from her gradual disappearance within oppressive sets.

In this choreography of the fall, Kinuyo Tanaka’s performance is a miracle of mimesis and internalization. Mizoguchi's signature actress, Tanaka traverses fifty years of Oharu's life with a physical and spiritual transformation that is simply astonishing. She is the hopeful young lady-in-waiting, the humiliated concubine of Lord Matsudaira, the betrayed courtesan, the bourgeois wife haunted by her past, the beggar, and finally the prostitute who has lost even her name. Her face, once luminous and proud, becomes a mask of opaque suffering; her movements, once graceful, become hunched and shuffling. Her performance is on the same plane as Maria Falconetti's in Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc: it is not acting; it is martyrdom. Both are icons of female suffering, but while Joan's is a spiritual passion that elevates her to sainthood, Oharu's is a social Stations of the Cross that degrades her to an outcast, stripping her of all dignity.

The most fruitful parallel, however, is perhaps not with cinema, but with European naturalist literature. Mizoguchi’s Oharu is a creature who seems to have stepped from the pages of Émile Zola or Giovanni Verga. Like Gervaise Macquart in L'Assommoir, she is crushed by an environmental and social determinism that offers her no escape. Every attempt at redemption is nullified by a mechanism larger than herself, a concatenation of cause and effect that has the iron logic of a scientific experiment. But unlike Zola's heroines, whose destinies are often sealed by hereditary taints, Oharu's fall is entirely attributable to the social structure. She is one of the "vanquished," in the purest sense of the Vergan term, a soul defeated by the immutable cycle of history and convention. If Defoe's Moll Flanders, another great "woman of pleasure" in literature, uses her intelligence and her body to climb the social ladder with a pragmatic, almost entrepreneurial spirit, Oharu is the absolute antithesis: she is a passive figure, whose only fault is to desire a normal life, a crumb of happiness in a world that systematically denies it to her.

Made in 1952, in a Japan still licking the wounds of the Second World War and living under American occupation, the film is a potent allegory. Mizoguchi, whose own sister was sold into geishadom by their father, pours all of his obsession with the female condition into this work, along with a ferocious critique of the vestiges of feudal Japan, whose patriarchal and oppressive logic, he believed, had not been entirely eradicated. By telling a 17th-century story, he is speaking directly to his present, calling into question the foundations of a culture that for centuries has sacrificed women. It is an act of incredible audacity, a j'accuse disguised as an impeccable costume drama.

The final sequence is among the most harrowing and powerful in the history of cinema. After being driven out even from the temple, Oharu wanders the streets. She sees a group of men and, out of instinct, out of habit, she approaches them with the tired, mechanical smile of a prostitute. "Gentlemen, wouldn't you like to buy a little love?" But then she stops, looks at her empty hands, and continues on her way, transforming into an itinerant nun, a spectral figure walking towards nothingness. There is no redemption, no catharsis, only the observation of an annihilated life. The narrative's circularity comes to a close: the woman who at the beginning contemplated the statues of the enlightened ones has herself become a wandering icon of suffering, a ghost drifting through an indifferent landscape.

"The Life of Oharu" is a total visual and emotional experience. It is a cinema that demands attention, one that rejects easy empathy to push the viewer toward a deeper reflection on the nature of power, society, and destiny. It is a merciless and necessary masterpiece, whose almost unbearable formal beauty only sharpens the brutality of its message. A film that, once seen, settles in the soul and continues to question us, like the enigmatic face of one of those temple statues, silent witnesses to humanity's infinite capacity to inflict and endure pain.