No matter how much we do for men, they abandon us when it suits them.
The second film in the Kenji Mizoguchi's Fallen Women set from Eclipse is 1936's Sisters of the Gion, which was made mere months after Osaka Elegy, yet represents a sizable leap in Mizoguchi's command of the medium. The Gion of the title is Kyoto's pleasure district and the sisters are a pair of geishas -- the older, more traditional Yoko Umemura and the deeply cynical, ever-scheming Isuzu Yamada -- trying to eke out a living there. As the film opens, Yamada is dismayed when Umemura's patron (Shiganoya Bendo) goes bankrupt and moves in with them, which Umemura accepts out of a sense of obligation to the down-on-his-luck merchant. Ever mindful about money, while Umemura is more concerned about appearances, Yamada scams an expensive kimono out of a poor fabric-store clerk (Taizo Fukami), hooks a new, financially solvent patron for her sister (Fumio Okura), and then goes to work on Fukami's boss (Eitarô Shindô) so she can have one herself. Her tangled web of lies unravels, though, when an embittered Fukami rats out Shindô to his suspicious wife (Sakurako Iwama) and then takes a more personal -- and direct -- revenge on the haughty Yamada.
The main thing that sets Sisters of the Gion apart from Osaka Elegy is its focus on the contrasting attitudes of the two sisters. Yamada's no-nonsense approach to their profession (which she has no illusions about) stems from the fact that she was formally educated before taking it up, whereas Umemura has never known any other way of life. Furthermore, Yamada openly questions their role in society, wondering where geishas fit into an increasingly modern Japan, and scorns their customers, saying, "Men come here and pay money to make playthings out of us. Is there a single exception?" And she's defiant to the end, even after she's felt the wrath of one of the men she tried to toy with. It just goes to show, in some societies turnabout is decidedly not fair play.