Utamaro and His Five Women

A film set in eighteenth-century Japan. Utamaro is a well known print master. He is famous for his portraits of women; the workshop reproduces his designs and everything he makes sells. At the opening a young painter challenges him. The meeting turns into a contest and the young man ends as his pupil. There are several women around Utamaro: those who work in the workshop, models, women from a pleasure house and the daughter of a nobleman. Each carries her own story and the narrative moves among them. At one point Utamaro draws directly on a woman's back; that passage is the film's most remembered scene. At the same time he gets into trouble. One of his prints is judged improper by the authorities and his hands are bound for fifty days; he is forbidden to draw. What the film is interested in is not the artist himself but the lives of the people around him and how those lives turn into material. It was made just after the Second World War under the censorship of the occupation. Period films were restricted, and this was one of the few that got permission. Minosuke Bando plays Utamaro and Kinuyo Tanaka one of the women. Kenji Mizoguchi directed. An interesting production for anyone who likes Japanese classics and stories about artists. For a viewer expecting a detailed life story, the film keeps the master himself in the background.