To a certain extent I agree with the critique that as a "biopic" of Kinuyo Tanaka, this falls well short of really capturing her or her life. But I also don't think that's really the point, or at least was Ichikawa's intention while making this. It may have been Kaneto Shindō's intent (though if it was he did a far better job in his own documentary on Mizoguchi a decade earlier). I'm more likely to buy into this being his own obsession and idea of Tanaka, and later Mizoguchi.
I'm more struck by the significance of the title "Actress". Ichikawa seems less interested in capturing the essence of Tanaka and more in the idea of how people play roles, whether that be as an actress, or as a director, a wife, etc. The entire film is a work of anachronisms. Whether it be the overly synthetic score, the overly stagy direction and staging techniques, or even the performances - which feel less like attempts to draw the audience into a period work than it is to make them overly aware of the falseness of it. None of the actors here (assuming this matters) look like the people they're playing - though I will say, the balls to cast Bunta Sugawara as Kenji Mizoguchi is something else - but that really doesn't matter. It's the attempt at presenting them in roles, the act (or art) of "acting", making you confront the illusion that we are so often forced to buy into in order to "believe" a role.
Ichikawa is also far more interested in charting the history of Japanese cinema of the period. From the silent period into the sound, the influx of foreign cinema, and the influence of the American occupation (though the war is almost never explicitly brought up). His use of clips and stills/images from other films and publicity photos from the period makes this clear. It's as much an essay as it is a work of dramatic construction.
And even then we're not meant to simply view this as a "biopic", a work which attempts to entertain an audience via cheap shortcuts of a person's life/people's lives, but as an assembly which attempts to make us question our own perception and conception of "film". At several points throughout, Ichikawa deliberately turns the camera onto us, the audience. Actively confronting us, as if he wasn't making obvious throughout the rest of the film with the artificiality of his presentation.
It's arguably a work which also denies its audience the pleasures and resolutions they would expect from a work like this. We are denied the satisfaction of witnessing Tanaka bloom into her own director or (if this was a more convention work) Mizoguchi getting "what's coming to him", or the maybe romance that the movie only suggests. The pleasure comes from seeing how Ichikawa is constantly offsetting the expectations of a work like this and instead of abiding by genre(?) conventions, turns this into a wholly rewarding and moving piece of cinematic representation.
