Hideko Takamine is the preeminent star of the Japanese melodrama, and a film like The Mistress (Wild Geese) shows us why. As Otama, a young woman who, in order to support her father, is trapped into becoming the mistress of a middle-aged pawnbroker, she captures-in her posture, her smallest movements and expressions-the essence of a caged bird. Otama is a thinker and a watcher, capable of looking inward at herself and outward at her situation at the same time. Thus, when she falls in love with a young student, Okada, who passes by her house every day, she can both indulge and deny herself that love. "Thinking won't change things," Otama is constantly being told; but Toyoda's is a feminist view of history, and during a period of great transformations, the 1880s, Otama is witness to every manner of male venality and female suffering in the guise of change. The storybook quality of the film's opening and closing is a nod to a pre-Meiji past-and perhaps to the literature of a pre-film era. Director Shiro Toyoda is known for masterful literary adaptations (see Snow Country November 26), yet his is least of all a craft of the spoken word; The Mistress is a lesson in the purely visual revelation of character. Among a hundred examples: Otama's chance meeting with her patron's wife, shot from above (all we see are two matching parasols); the shadow of rain pouring down a wall, seeming to engulf Otama in a hopeless moment; the ritual that signals her compromised position anew each afternoon, as the old man sends the maid away, and she quietly locks the garden gate.