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Cinema Ozu (11): Beauty's Sorrows & Relative Tragedy

21: Beauty's Sorrows / Bijin aishu (1931)
Status: completely lost
Script: full script preserved

I should hope that my affection for Ozu and his work is obvious by now, because this article is going to relish in his biggest creative and critical failure (up to this point). We're still in the early years of Ozu's career, and as I've said previously, he was nothing if not a dabbler. I've seen the title of Beauty's Sorrows also translated as The Beauty and the Sorrow, but either way, it's a perfect moniker for the first (and last) romantic melodrama from Ozu, which ran a whopping 15 reels.

Bordwell's synopsis made me laugh repeatedly, with about three "oh, Je-sus"-es muttered. Tatsuo Saito and Tokihiko Okada play two friends (the dual leads). Okada, you'll recall, played Okajima ("The Beard") in The Lady and the Beard.

According to Bordwell, the plot goes something like this: two friends become infatuated with a sculpted work of a beautiful woman, she turns out to be real, and tragedy strikes.

Perhaps I should elaborate, paraphrasing Bordwell's synopsis.

Okada and Saito play pals Okamoto and Sano, respectively. The alliteration of matching first letters makes it easy to keep up. Okamoto and Sano are friends with an older professional sculptor named Yoshida (Sotaro Okada). Yoshida's newest work takes their breath away, and Sano manages to convince Yoshida to part with it. Okamoto one-ups his pal by wooing and marrying Yoshida's daughter Yoshie (Yukiko Inoue), who was the reference model for the sculpture. Wait, here comes the first twist.

Okamoto is a jobless deadbeat who borrows money from Sano to live on. The heartbroken Sano begins drowning his ironic despair with booze while his buddy lives off of his money and the happiness he wanted...but not for long.

When Yoshie's dad comes to visit, she is suddenly afflicted with Sudden, Tragic and Incurably Ill Spouse Syndrome and dies. The audience should have seen this coming, since one of the wedding presents was a record whose A-side is "The Wedding March", and "The Funeral March" on the B-side.

Okamoto is understandably devastated, and orders Sano to give him the Yoshie sculpture. Sano tells him to get bent, and then Okamoto utterly destroys the sculpture in a very alpha male display of "if I can't have 'her', no one will!". The two men then get into a brawl that ends both of their lives. Yoshida finds their corpses among the rubble of the smashed statue. He collects the remaining pieces and returns home, where he buries them.

With a runtime at around the 2.5-hour mark, I can't say I'm completely crushed that I'm not obligated to watch a movie that the critics virulently hated at the time. If it were miraculously found all of a sudden, yes, I'd be first in line to see this Greatest Misfire.

Bordwell notes that the critics accused Ozu of doing lackluster work due to a real-life obsession with Yukiko Inoue (who played Yoshie) that echoed the film. In retrospect, there doesn't seem to be much to this claim, which smells like an easy, tabloid-y accusation designed to add spice to a negative review. Inoue would make only one more movie with Ozu, 1932's Spring Comes from the Ladies (also lost).

Before we get to that lost film, we come across Tokyo Chorus chronologically. Bordwell rightfully considers Chorus to mark Ozu's birth as a Great Director.

The entry you're reading was unexpectedly delayed due to the sudden, inspired addition of an Appendix article on actor Tokihiko Okada. I discovered a fascinating, heartbreaking, and heartwarming narrative that bears telling. "Appendix B" will accompany my in-the-works piece on Tokyo Chorus, the earliest Ozu title available in the USA. Expect to see both early tomorrow.

Cinema Ozu is a limited-run series of articles about the career and impact of Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu. My primary intent is to chronicle my own journey through his films, a fair number of which I have seen, but even more of which I have not. The most essential research tools I have used are David Bordwell's book Ozu and the Poetics of Cinema and definitive Ozu fansite "Ozu-san".

The series is also timed to celebrate the July 2010 U.S. release of The Only Son and There Was a Father as a DVD double-set by The Criterion Collection. You can find all entries in Cinema Ozu here. New to the series? It's best to start from the beginning.