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Made in 1953 by a Japanese director named Shiro Toyoda, The Mistress starts out like a commonplace discussion of prostitution. The heroine is a girl of poor family, who gets money to support her ailing father by selling herself into concubinage. Her benefactor is a hard-eyed, middle-aged type who represents himself as a widower and a cloth merchant from a nearby town. All goes well enough at first, but soon unpleasant little things begin to come out. The man has a wife and two children. What's more, he is not a merchant at all, but a moneylender, a member of a profession dreaded and despised by the poor. A ruined client of her master attacks the girl, screaming hysterically that the mistress has grown fat and pretty from "sucking our blood."
"God!" she cries. "Is this the only way I can live?" She runs to her father for advice, but the old man is only too willing to let his daughter sacrifice herself to his comfort. She meets a young student, and in his face she sees that there are better things in life than she has known. But he goes abroad to study. Shattered, she finds herself standing alone at the edge of a pond. The water, cool and dark, invites her down. Then a wild goose takes to the air with a thunder of wings. She stares after it, a light waking in her eyes. The soul too is a bird; the soul too is free.
In such a rudimentary story most directors in the West would have seen no more than the usual sentimental folderol about a fallen woman. Even Director Toyoda has committed several sentimental excesses in the Japanese manner—the lover boy, for instance, drifts around with the vague, pathetic expression of a chrysanthemum that has lost its buttonhole. Nevertheless, Toyoda's realism has power and strangeness. He does not see life in the Western way, as a heroic struggle to overcome the forces of nature, but in the Eastern way, as a religious struggle to submit to the forces of nature.
The mood is sensitively developed in the photography and in the playing. Actress Hideko Takamine is lovely as a vase. Actor Eijiro Tono, as the seamy little sugar daddy, gives a performance that is the finest thing in the film. He squats like a monkey, irritably fanning his crotch. He pants hideously as he smears cold cream on his mistress' sensuous young shoulders. And yet somehow he conveys a humbling sense that for all its beastliness, this thing is a man, framed of a substance with all men, made in the image of his Creator.