When a Woman Ascends the Stairs
(Onna ga kaidan wo agaru toki)

When night first falls on the Ginza bar district, the voice of Keiko (again played by the sublime Hideko Takamine) confesses: “I have always hated climbing stairs. Before, I used to pray, then forced myself to put on another face and appear gay”. Now it is the passing years that are changing Keiko’s face: opening her own bar, paying her debts, getting married and no longer living with the only happy thought being that of her late husband. In the last scene of the film, Keiko again climbs the stairs, laboriously, puts on a new face to smile to her customers. But her voice no longer comments the film. Four years earlier, Mizoguchi was filming Street of Shame. Whoever has seen it cannot forget the film’s final shot, the last of all his work: the face of a young and inexperienced prostitute, the brothel’s youngest recruit, awkwardly calls out to the men in the street, wearing an alienated smile. These “little women” – meaning women with no status – kept up a proximity through the masterpieces of Mizoguchi and Naruse, and also attained the status of ordinary tragedians. JB