Click here to copy URL

The Life of Oharu

Saikaku ichidai onna (The Life of Oharu)

1952

Kenji Mizoguchi

Kinuyo Tanaka, Tsukie Matsuura, Ichiro Sugai, Toshirô Mifune ...

8.0

2,627

Drama It tells the story of Oharu, a 50-year-old woman who suffers the strict conventions of 17th century Feudal Japan. She becomes the lover of a man, but when they are discovered, Oharu and her family are obliged to live in exile.

	Author	Review
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"No woman in a Japanese film that I have seen is more tragic and unforgettable than Oharu (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	A.H. Weiler The New York Times	"The film makes a sharp, if obvious, point. But the basic story, slowly unfolded with the majestic solemnity of vignettes on silk screens, is as obvious and lachrymose as a soap opera."	NEU
United States	Ed Gonzalez Slant	"'Life of Oharu' represents the Holy Grail of Japanese cinema (...) Its genius is (...) that Mizoguchi uses Oharu’s life to peel back the layers of the physical self and reveal the soul that lies bruised beneath (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United Kingdom	David Parkinson Empire	"Such rarely relieved misery could have become mawkish, but Tanaka's sincerity and Mizoguchi's finesse ensure it avoids lapsing into melodrama (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Ignatiy Vishnevetsky AV Club	"The movie’s pessimism is so thorough and nuanced that it registers not as an attitude, but as a complete worldview (...) It’s a testament to cinema’s ability to (...) serve as an honest-to-God emotional experience."	POS
United Kingdom	Time Out	"The social evils exposed have an unmistakable contemporary relevance (...) An extremely elegant movie whichever way you look at it"	POS
United Kingdom	Tom Dawson BBC	"Both formally beautiful and unsentimentally compassionate, 'The Life Of Oharu' deserves to be seen and appreciated on the big screen (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United Kingdom	Philip French The Guardian	"One of his supreme masterpieces"	POS
United States	Matt Brennan IndieWire	"It’s epic yet delicate, set in feudal Japan but animated by modern anxieties, at once a traditional picaresque and a bold feminist classic."	POS
United States	Dave Kehr Chicago Reader	"[It] is stately, controlled, and impeccably constructed (...) A near-perfect work"	POS

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.