"Sisters of the Gion" (1936)

...
An auction. Seated bidders excitedly shout their desires and gesture commercial instincts, in the hanging heat of the small shop space, fanning themselves vigorously. The opening of the film bespeaks a young director's evident fondness for the latest technique: a lateral tracking shot that captures the energy of the auction, the rapid discourse of objects sold by catalogue numbers and quick glances. One has yet small clue as to how the conventional japanese concern for financial ruin (conspicuously the more shameful of shameful misfortunes that could befall a hero of early japanese cinematic fiction) will come about, the perennial theme of minor muted tragedy.
...
Gion, district of Kyoto, the premier nexus for the geisha practice. By the time Mizoguchi came into awareness of his powers as a storyteller, he focused his attention on a central institution of japanese culture: the geisha myth. 1836 Kyoto: famine, rural uprisings, the Tempo crisis, western flirtations with Japan. By 1936 the west had infiltrated Japan through the media of popular culture: young women wished to dress like Greta Garbo or Joan Crawford. Kyoto was no longer the Kyoto of old, and the legendary Gion district was a relic of former luxuriance, wealth, & artistry. Debt to the indebted, the new order of the day. The patriarchy had run out of cultural capital, and young women were becoming empowered. Mizoguchi discovered a powerful subject to capture and exploit: the plight of women on the uptake.
...

The sisters in question are Umekichi and Omocha, complete opposites in temperament and belief. Umekichi is the older, traditional-minded geisha, who stays loyal to her few benefactors, even when the men who had once supported her can no longer sustain their own lives. Omocha, younger, prettier, and a hundred-times more ambitious, plays the New Woman, the 20th Century Woman, the Liberated Woman: she is a geisha too, but with her awareness of the commodity she presents to her current and future clients, uses her charm, wit, and language to her own advantage; when a client can't feed or entertain her properly, or buy her a decent kimono, she dumps him immediately; she fishes the fishermen, looks for the Big Fish, cares not a whit for the man's age or attractiveness. What matters is capital, and the thing that lasts the shortest time is love.
...
Mizoguchi uses the parable of 2 sisters, analogues for the Old World and the New, to showcase the problems women face in a shifting, unpredictable economy and a patriarchal culture losing its traditional currency in a world turned more liberal and increasingly capitalistic. That neither Umekichi nor Omocha deserve what they receive at the end is far from the point; Mizoguchi after all directed Osaka Elegy the same year, starring a female protagonist almost exactly Omocha's doppelganger: headstrong, voracious, implacable. He is not concerned with moralizing over the world's unfairness to these women, but he does care that we see they will, in the end, survive: what matters most to Mizoguchi, the artist, is the iconic sight of Omocha (and Osaka Elegy's Ayako) defiantly resisting the patronage of men, swearing aloud that she will persist despite her fallen state...
...