Il ritratto della signora Yuki

Michiyo Kogure is adored by all who do not know her. She is the beautiful daughter of a nobleman -- his title and lands stripped from him in the post-war era. She has a dashing husband in Eijirô Yanagi -- who is a wastrel who spends his time elsewhere with his gun-chewing mistress, Yuriko Hamada. She and Ken Uehara have a chaste but supportive relationship -- he tells her what she should do but she can't do it. When her father dies, all that is left is the country estate, which she turns into an inn -- her husband wants to take it from her and give it to Miss Hamada to run.

It's a portrait of decayed nobility in a post-war world, where Miss Kogure tries to live up to the standards of a vanished world, where everyone who doesn't know her is caught up in her glamor. Kenji Mizoguchi's movie from a novel by Seiichi Funabashi is a sad and solemn work, with a satiric edge. In works like LIFE OF OHARU, the character's decline is slow, because the heights are low. Here it's a precipitous plunge.