Princess Yang Kwei-fei (1955) User Reviews (10)

Sacrifice in Living Colour

[GyatsoLa · 8/10 · 29 June 2008]

Sometimes its a good idea not to read up on a movie before watching it, it can set up an expectation (or lack of it) that interferes with viewing pleasure. In the newly released Masters of Cinema version the critic Tony Raines is highly dismissive in the introduction - calling it dramatically inert and making a few rather pompous and pedantic points about the translation. Donald Richie in his 'Hundred Years of Japanese Film' is similarly dismissive. It is certainly not Mizoguchi's best, it lacks the flair of Ugetsu and the character development of his more contemporary dramas, but I think this movie is far better than the dismissive comments suggest. Maybe its just that Japanese cinema of the period is so fabulously rich that even very good movies can be discounted.

The story is taken from an ancient Chinese legend - of the beautiful concubine of a great emperor, sacrificed for the sins of her family. No doubt the Chinese setting looks rather ludicrous to Chinese viewers (it was originally a co-production with HK based company, but they seem to have had no artistic input), but thats hardly new - even Crouching Dragon, Hidden Tiger was hated by most mandarin speakers I know. And its probably no worse that the Last Samurai or Memoirs of a Geisha appears to the Japanese.

It was Mizuguchi's first colour film - while some commentators have praised the beauty of the camera-work, I must admit I was left a big cold by it - not a patch on (for example) Ozu's first colour experiments. It may be that the blame is the digital colour transfer or just my poor quality screen, but I think its more than that - I get the strong impression the movie was shot on a very tight budget - some of the sets look very fake compared to most Mizoguchi' films I've seen. I don't think the film makers were totally aware of how colour can show up fakery in a way they could get away with using black and white. In fact, the whole movie has a slightly throw away feel, as if Mizoguchi didn't fully have his heart in it. There are lots of opportunities for the sort of big sweeping scene he specialised in, but which aren't taken up here - I would guess that he simply didn't have the time and budget for it.

But I don't mean to criticise this too much - while the script is occasionally clunky, it is usually very moving and beautifully acted. The characters are vivid and while its a little bit much to believe that a great Emperor could be quite such a sappy soul, Mori and Kyo do a reasonable job in making their characters believable - or as believable as possible when translating such an ancient story. Kyo as always is wonderfully watchable. Mori is slightly less successful - he doesn't quite show the steel that much have existed under the cultured exterior of a man who ran an empire.

So while this film is certainly not a masterpiece by Mizoguchi, or one of the best movies of the period, its certainly superior to most contemporary costume dramas and well worth having to while away a rainy Sunday afternoon.

A Beautiful Ambiguity

[boblipton · 8/10 · 9 August 2019]

The Empress is dead, and Chinese Emperor Masayuki Mori mourns endlessly. Scullery maid Machiko Kyô is chosen by her relatives and trained to please the Emperor, but it is her frankness as much as her beauty which pleases him. When she is made his consort, however, her relatives call in favors for wealth and position, until the populace demand their deaths, and hers.

It's another of Kenji Mizoguchi's beautifully made and exquisite dramas, full of long, slow moving shots, and actors who move silently, but movingly. Mizoguchi had started as a performer of women's roles. When he began to direct in the early 1920s, he directed these pictures, because, as he later said, "When I was working for Nikkatsu, the company already had Murata Minoru making films featuring heroes, so for balance they made me do films featuring heroines. Also, I am very quarrelsome and so when I work there is always the possibility of a fight, but I can't very well slug an actress." He was another of those tough, artistic directors who feigned a low-brow attitude, like John Ford.

I thought there was much that was ambiguous about Miss Kyô's character here. Is she being honest, or frank? Are her actions in returning to her humble origins honest, or a miscalculated power play? Is my uncertainty because I am a cynical westerner, not the intended audience, or because that is how Mizoguchi intended me to think?

Regardless of how I react to the story raised to the level of fantastic legend of this movie, it certainly is a beautiful thing to look at. For the moment, that's enough.

Good film, beautifully shot and made, but with a typical story...

[ottffsse_sequence · 7/10 · 10 February 2006]

Like with 'Zangiku monogatari', Mizoguchi has made a very beautiful film. The long tracking shots, deep focus editing, and vibrant colors are gorgeous. Yet the story in 'Yang Kwei fei", just like in Mizo's 'Zangiku monogatari' and 'The Crucified Lovers', is very typical and unexceptional. Be prepared to see ideal archetypes of perfectly virtous self-sacrificing women, stupid greedy and cruel men, and did I mention?...the cruelties of feudalism. I think such a simple story set during feudalism is a weakness in this film. It leaves a viewer commonly thinking: feudalism sucks (boy that's new), it's good it's over,...what's next? This is a perfectly valid critique. Mizoguchi's vastly better films are his realistic masterworks from 1036: 'Osaka Elegy' and 'Sisters of the Gion', as well as his late more retrained masterpieces 'Ugetsu', 'Sansho Dayu', and 'Life of Oharu'.

mizoguchi again creates one of the most beautiful movies i have ever seen

[FilmBoy999 · 20 March 2000]

Princess Yang Kwei Fei is an absolutely wonderfully and touching movie, which features Mizoguchi's astoundingly beautifully storytelling and direction. The Cinderella style story of a peasant step sister who is suddenly made the bride of the emporer and their ultimate love is totally spellbinding. This is not a film to watch lightly, it requires concentration and appreciation of the beauty of the film. If you've never seen anything by Mizoguchi watch Ugetsu as well. It's beautiful and only 90 minutes long for those who can't take subtitles (losers). 10 out of 10.

Sumptuous

[Billiam-4 · 6/10 · 8 August 2021]

Sumptuous, beautifully set and photographed period drama is a love tragedy of truly Shakespearean dimensions; but maybe not quite as stirring as it could have been.

Perhaps Mizoguchi's Most Underrated

[animalmother05 · 10/10 · 16 December 2006]

Donald Richie, the famous scholar of Japanese film, has dismissed this as a dull reworking of Chinese* history, albeit with some nice-looking colors. Though many others have agreed, his analysis is correct in one detail merely: the colors are absolutely beautiful, even in the VHS my library has. As it is one of only two color films Mizoguchi ever made, and the more beautiful of the two, this alone would make Yokihi a worthwhile watch.

But this film has a strange relationship with the beauty that is present, both in the color and in the relationship between the Emperor and Yang Kwei-Fei. The film admires beauty, but it is about the prostitution of beauty and the hatred that beauty can inspire. Some have accused it of being merely another Cinderella story, just like all the others, and it would certainly be a mistake to overlook the similarities. But it looks at the Cinderella archetype in a more disillusioned way: instead of being Yang Kwei-Fei's escape from her unfortunate family, her relationship with the Emperor is exploited by the same family members so that she is just as much their slave as she had always been, and so that, when the Chinese peasants get upset at the corruption caused by her family, naturally they lash out at her. But because of the sheer beauty of the film, both visual and in the way that the relationship between the Emperor and Yang Kwei-Fei is treated, the film is not cynical, ironic, and it never thinks itself better than the myths from which it arises. Instead, it becomes a sublime fabulous (in much the same way that many of Mizoguchi's greatest films, such as Zangiku Monogatari, Saikaku Ichidai Onna, Ugetsu Monogatari, and Sansho Dayu, resemble fables) romantic tragedy about beauty and its exploitation.

*This is not a typographical error. Though the film itself is Japanese, the legend of Yang Kwei-Fei is Chinese, and as such the film is set in China.

truly great color photography

[Quinoa1984 · 9/10 · 12 July 2006]

I remember seeing this film more than two years ago, and while the entire story is not very memorable (I could probably not tell everything that happens in it now, which is perhaps more my fault than the filmmaker), I have a fond memory of seeing it in visual beauty. Kenji Mizogichi, a filmmaker I admire from Ugetsu, has here a very lushly made film, with perfectly constructed sets that spark a tinge of both fable and centuries-gone reality, and costumes that compliment the color photography. And that part, of capturing the images, is maybe the best thing that can be recommendable about the film. For a film about a Princess who was once lower on the ranks in the Emperor's home and becomes the Emperor's love interest, it provides such opportunities for a real vision to set in to guide it all.

Mizoguchi provides it with his cinematographer Kôhei Sugiyama in order sometimes for the film to be told almost all on visual terms (the filmmaker was most prolific in the silent-film era). So in the end, even as the story becomes a little cluttered with some scenes, it's never too complex due to the basics that the filmmaker is going for- and probably why it was picked up by Buena Vista distribution in the 1950s- a beautiful scope of Japan's regal side mixed with some of the lower classes. It's like a Shakespearean tale if it was superimposed into Japan and given a touch of that lost-era of color photography that was only matched by Powell/Pressburger's films.

Yin and Yang.

[brogmiller · 10/10 · 2 September 2022]

Despite poor health Kenji Mizoguchi mangaged to make about eighty films over a thirty-four year period. Thanks to International Film Festivals it was the works of his final decade that brought him deserved recognition in the West.

This is the first of his two colour films made the year before his death and perhaps because of its lack of natural background and its formalised setting, it has been unjustly overlooked.

It could hardly be said to be teeming with life but captures brilliantly the enclosed and stifling nature of the eighth century Chinese court with its rules, rituals and the rigid protocol that would ultimately lead to the sacrifice of its title character. As a child Mizoguchi had witnessed his sister being sold as a Geisha and it is hardly surprising that the social condition of women was to become his overriding theme.

The attention to detail here is stunning thanks to exquisite art design by Hiroshi Mizatini and costumes by Tsugio Togo whilst cinematographer Kohei Sugiyama shoots in glorious Daiecolor. Not for nothing has Mizoguchi been described as having 'the eye of a painter and the soul of a poet'.

The superlative cast is headed by a sensitive Masayuki Mori as Emperor Xuan, a bravura So Yamamura as Anshan and of course the magical Machiko Kyo as the ill-fated Princess Kwei Fei.

Coincidentally this film was released the same year as Max Ophuls' 'Lola Montes', his only film in colour, and his last. Lola of course flees the country so as to spare Ludwig's monarchy. Film historian David Thomson has observed that both films depict 'the impossible balance between authority and despair, beauty and prison.'

Early Japanese-Hong Kong collaboration

[Leofwine_draca · 5/10 · 16 November 2022]

PRINCESS YANG KWI FEI is an early collaboration betwene Japan's Daiei studio and Hong Kong's Shaw Brothers, and it's very much a sumptuous-looking historical drama. I'm not sure if it's based on a true story but it certainly feels like it is. The story is about an ageing Chinese emperor and a family who gradually insinuate themselves into his court, causing a popular revolt as a result. The film looks Chinese but feels Japanese with a mainly Japanese cast and the usual quietly mannered performances you tend to find in Japanese cinema. It's not the most engrossing out there, but a good example of this genre.

Costumes Rule!

[net_orders · 3/10 · 10 December 2017]

THE PRINCESS YANG KWE FEI / (YÔKIHI). Viewed on Streaming. Costume design = ten (10) stars; cinematography = nine (9) stars; restoration/preservation = four (4) stars; set design = four (4) stars; score = two (2) stars. Director Kenji Mizoguchi's small-scale, sound-stage-bound production of a Pygmalion-like legend set in the court of the Emperor of China (circa eighth century) involving a just-off-the-farm girl turned kitchen maid who is promoted by overly ambitious clan politicians to become the Emperor's favorite concubine. This is the standard zero-to-hero plot line used in many Japanese films. (In stark contrast to the elongated English title picked by Western distributors, there is neither a princess nor an extant empress to be seen in the movie!) Political over reach eventually results in a "popular" revolt that murders the "princess" and almost over throws the Emperor. The uprising consists of about 40 extras (and this is supposed to be population-heavy China)! A mostly seasoned cast (including well-known character actress Haruko Sugimura) is allowed to deliver ho-hum/lack-luster performances across the board (although heavy-handed editing may have been a contributing factor). Leading actress Machiko Kyô is seriously miscast as the "princess." She is too old for the role. The real stars of this film are the costumes that look simply stunning in color and the small sets that initially appear rich and splendid (in color) but later seem rather drab (perhaps due to budgetary constraints?). Cinematography (narrow-screen format, color) and lighting are very good. Restoration failed to remove age-related noise artifacts especially during the initial third of the film. Score is uneven and a mixed bag using apparently indigenous instruments. It ranges from fairly pleasant multi-string lute solos to ensembles that sound like cat-strangulation orgies! Shooting in color does not compensate for an otherwise colorless photo play! WILLIAM FLANIGAN, PhD.