Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1946 film The Victory of Women isn’t among his cinematically or emotionally richest works: drawing on then-current waves of post-war legal reform, it often feels overly didactic, its characters generally registering less as people than as contrasting ideological mouthpieces. But despite (and to some extent because of) that, it makes for fascinating and urgent viewing, finding sadly easy parallel in the debates of our own age. Hiroko Hawakawa (Kinuyo Tanaka) is a recently qualified lawyer taking on the case of a poor widow who, overwhelmed with grief after losing her husband, accidentally crushed her baby to death; where the prosecution charges simple parental neglect, Hawakawa sees her client as a victim of an insensitive patriarchal and militaristic society (in which, for instance, the husband received health care for his workplace-incurred injuries for as long as the war continued, but afterwards had it abruptly withdrawn). The somewhat overly-compressed narrative scheme includes a zealous prosecutor, Kono, who happens to be Harakawa’s brother in law, with a wife/sister caught in the middle; some five years earlier, Kono participated in prosecuting political activists including Hawakawa’s fiancée, who’s released at the start of the film, his health ruined as a result of his ordeal. The film sets the notion of an independent and objective legal system against one informed by societal needs and changes, while of course making it evident that any claim to the former will always be as ideologically driven as the latter (in this regard in particular, viewed at a time of a supposedly Constitution-respecting yet pathologically activist US Supreme Court, the film carries renewed topical resonance). Mizoguchi withholds the ultimate outcome of the widow’s case, tacitly suggesting that legal victory in this particular battle may be unattainable. But he leaves no doubt regarding the disposition of the moral victory.
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