Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshô dayû)

SANSHÔ THE BAILIFF (Sanshô dayû)             A                                         

Japan  (125 mi)  1954  d:  Kenji Mizoguchi

           

The origin of this legend of Sansho Dayu, the Bailiff, goes back to medieval times when Japan had not yet emerged from the Dark Ages and mankind had yet to awaken as human beings. It has been told by the people for centuries and is treasured today as one of the epic folk tales of our history.

—opening title sequence

A magnificent film, a monumental work of Shakespearean depth, poetic, epic, with unbearably poignant, haunting contrasts at play throughout the entire film, where striking images of grotesque evil and violence are followed almost immediately by serene beauty and peace, revealing a wonderful sense of time and off-camera space, one of the more emotionally wrenching experiences one could ever see.  So much of the film is pure feeling, with visual and aural motifs, the everpresent sound of the flute represents the feeling of the father, a song of anguish represents the presence of the absent mother, while the ballad of Narayama, the subject of Imamura’s 1983 Cannes Palme D’Or winner, is a particularly haunting portrait of death, with skulls and bones, the sounds of carrion birds, and the enormous wooden gates that swing open and closed leading to the graveyard from which the two children make their escape, camera by Kazuo Miyagawa, music by Fumio Hayasaka. 

Set in 11th century Japan, the story reveals a title-bearing noble family torn apart by political upheavals.  The father, who represents the conscience of the family, is a governor exiled by political enemies for refusing to send starving peasant farmers into battle under the military service of the Prime Minister, as every man is needed in the fields, while the mother, the emotional center, is sold into prostitution while the children are sold into slavery.  From this utter devastation, the mother and children struggle not only to survive, but to maintain the father’s mission, to put into action his powerful sense of humanity, where the self-sacrificing women are portrayed as the redeemers of men.  Of interest, the title of the film bears the name of the villain, the ruthless overseer of the slave camp, revealing the director’s tragic vision of virtue tortured, altered, emerging only partially triumphant, suggesting the past is never really past.  In the end, flutes play in an orchestra, the camera follows an isolated cove where the beachcomber cares for seaweed in silent, meticulous motion.  There is a perfect harmony in the endless beauty of the ocean, a final image of affirmation, transcendence, eternity, a small piece of serene harmony in a violent world of disturbance and turmoil.

Known for its fluid camera movement and endlessly beautiful long shots, the film is an essential work and one of the greatest Japanese films ever made, where New Yorker movie critic Anthony Lane acknowledges “I have seen Sansho only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal.”  Winner of the Silver Lion Award at Venice for the third consecutive year, this movie is a special favorite of Terrence Malick, who once adapted it for the stage.  A harrowing work, essentially a heartbreaking Medieval fable with modern political and psychological undertones, it is the picture of a horribly difficult life making its way through an unforgiving world littered with terrible cruelty and human suffering.  With a focus on interior strength, as proclaimed by the father, “Without compassion, a man is no longer human,” this is nothing less than a morality play with sublime camera movements and visually lyrical imagery following each character’s personal journey for family redemption that mirrors Mizoguchi’s own experience, where at age 13 his father sold his sister into prostitution.  What a saga to regain the family honor. 

Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari)

UGETSU (Ugetsu monogatari)             A                    

aka:  Tales of Moonlight and Rain

Japan  (96 mi)  1953  d:  Kenji Mizoguchi

There is in this film, first and foremost, the amazing musical soundtrack by Fumio Hayasaka, which is one of the most avant garde, particularly considering its era from the early 50’s, which at times feels like a Japanese classical Noh version of the Velvet Underground, with a dissonant sounding electric violin crashing against our senses, veering out into its own territory painfully out of tune, as if wounded, crying out in helpless agony.  This imbalanced psychological sound implant helps us understand the anguished, out of control mindset of the characters.  The film combines two original stories by Akinari Ueda, originally published in 1776, set during the feudal civil war era of the 16th century, the first being The House in the Thicket, a Ulysses-like adventure where a man leaves his wife for seven years while he travels to make money by selling silk.  When he returns, he is greeted by her ghost, leaving him reeling in guilt, loss, and remorse.  The second story, A Serpent's Lust, features a man seduced by a demon woman posing as a princess.  Mizoguchi and scriptwriter Yoshikata Yoda reframe these two stories into one, creating an effective portrait of misguided ambition, showing men who are willing to abandon everything driven by their own greed, without ever concerning themselves with the consequences of their families.  With an almost IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE (1946) second look at their lives, these irresolute men who leave their families in search of their own selfish dreams discover later what they overlooked during their journey. 

Genjuro (Masayuki Mori) becomes obsessed with earning unheard of profits selling his pottery at local markets, risking his own life as well as his family’s at the chance to sell even more at the inflated prices induced by war, taking advantage of the misfortunes of others, ignoring warnings to seek safety from an oncoming army that is ravaging the villages, while his rather foolish brother Tobei, Sakae Ozawa, has designs on becoming a great samurai warrior.  When the war comes to their village, they both greedily fill a boatload with pottery and travel with their reluctant wives to a city across the lake.  But on their way, a fog descends onto the lake leaving them engulfed in an eerie mist where they encounter a ghost-like floating vessel with a dying passenger onboard who in his last breath warns them of mortal dangers ahead.  Inexplicably, despite the same warnings from the war ravaged region they left behind, they both return, deciding what lies ahead is no place for women, dropping off their wives to fend for themselves before returning alone to cross the river to sell their wares. 

Time passes as the men eventually blend into the landscape pursuing their dreams while forgetting about what they left behind on the other shore, which we see in graphic detail, as the opportunistic peacefulness of one shore contrasts against the brutalization and murder on the other, where one wife is killed almost immediately while the other succumbs to prostitution.  This causes a rift in consciousness that expands to supernatural levels as Genjuro falls under the possessive spell of the mysterious ghost princess Lady Wakusa, the superbly enticing Machiko Kyô, who resides in the surreal opulence of the Kutsuki Manor, a castle on the outskirts of town where Genjuro becomes ensnared, like a spider in her web, while led to believe these are the happiest moments in his life, “I never imagined such pleasures existed!”  Meanwhile, Tobei finds his own rewards as well, although through deception in a Falstaff-like manner, taking credit for murdering a rival lord that he just accidentally happened upon.  Over time, both regret the loss of what they’ve left behind.  When Genjuro expresses his desire to leave the castle, Lady Wakusa’s fury knows no bounds.

Eventually both men find their way back to their original homes, stripped of all possessions, now strangely quiet and empty, beautifully captured in one long take by cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa, as we follow Genjuro’s haunting entrance to his home as he scans the premises and finds nothing, yet the camera doesn’t stop searching, slowly feeling its way around the edges of the rooms until we rediscover an apparition of his wife, Kinuyo Tanaka from The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna) (1952), waiting patiently for him to return.  As with many other Mizoguchi films, there’s a sense of almost comic overacting from his characters, perhaps overly theatrical, as if they’re onstage instead of in front of a camera, which may work in an artificial setting, such as the highly exaggerated Lady Macbeth-like stage of Lady Wakusa, but seems oddly out of place in an otherwise realist aesthetic.  Yet in this film, with its shifts alternating from ordinary, everyday life to the supernatural, which feel seamlessly integrated, it’s the lurid world of the ghost princess that rises above everything else, as her anguished internalized pain, reflected by that amazing musical score that seems to stand for every woman whose life and dreams have been abandoned altogether, left to wither and die without ever bearing fruit, without anyone ever considering what their dreams may have been.