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.

The Life of Oharu (Saikaku ichidai onna)

THE LIFE OF OHARU (Saikaku ichidai onna)                  A-             

Japan  (136 mi)  1952  d:  Kenji Mizoguchi

Princess Morning Glory answered the nobleman

She plucked the flowers and offered them

For a long time

She stares pensively at the flower in her hand

Can this be real

It is her fate to wither in the shade

Day and night

She stares at the deutzia blossoms

They fill her heart

By good fortune she is given to the Imperial palace

What a lucky flower

How enviable, how lucky you are

Reluctantly she offers the flower in her hand

But this flower is only the go-between

In fact, your face is the flower that captured my heart.

—musician singing in Bunraku puppet play

My sad fate is pitiful indeed

My pillow is soaked with tears

This painful world of transience

How pitiful I am

I’m growing old

This life full of regrets

Will evaporate

Like the morning dew

—street beggar singing, eventually becoming Oharu

Mizoguchi considered this to be his finest work, his first to gain international renown following Kurosawa’s Venice prize-winning film RASHOMON (1950) in 1951, making him a cult hero with the Parisian Cahiers du Cinéma crowd, winner of the Venice Festival International Award in 1952, based on a 17th century novel by Saikaku Ohara, The Life of an Amorous Woman, but differing substantially.  Saikaku’s novel is a collection of episodes narrated by an elderly nun recalling her decline from a promising youth, ending with a scene of a prostitute entering a temple and hallucinating the faces of former lovers in the idols there. This film is a harrowing chronicle of the oppression of women, following the misfortunes of a single woman, Oharu played by Kinuyo Tanaka, the daughter of a respected samurai, whose fall from grace is filmed in slow, meticulous detail, using hauntingly beautiful compositions, showing remarkable insights into Oharu’s psychology, balancing social criticism with serene formal beauty. Mizoguchi earned a reputation of being a “Stroheim” on the set, firing his assistant Uchikawa Seichiro when he complained about last minute changes of studio-built houses, also of the replica built for the garden of Kyoto’s Koetsu temple.  With ornate use of historical costumes and signature tracking shots and long takes, achieving formal perfection, compressing into a single shot what might normally take two or three different takes, making extraordinary use of period architecture, with a heavy reliance on ritual, where submissive gestures such as bowing often define one’s character, the film is actually driven by the expressive music written by Ichirô Saitô, using Bunraku puppet theater percussion and flute, where the mournful lyrics heard throughout from pieces of songs offer the poetic themes of the film. 

THE LIFE OF OHARU is a sad and forlorn tale of sin and retribution imposed by an unforgiving feudal society that views love outside one’s class more as ill-advised lust during this historical period, a heavily repressive society for those who marry outside their aristocratic nobility.  When Oharu falls in love with a lowly page, Katsunosuke (an unrecognizable Toshirô Mifune), the Imperial family is so outraged she is banished in court, her husband beheaded in disgrace, and her family permanently exiled from Kyoto.  With no other means of income, her father is forced to sell Oharu into prostitution where she becomes a courtesan in Edo period Japan.  Just a few years before his death four years later, apparently driven to produce greatness after Kurosawa’s recognition a year earlier, this is the first of three masterpieces starring Tanaka that Mizoguchi directed in the early 1950’s, followed shortly afterwards by Ugetsu (Ugetsu monogatari) (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshô dayû) (1954), where in SANSHO, perhaps the director’s finest, it reiterates familiar themes where a wife is sold into prostitution while her children are sold into slavery.  Mizoguchi was heavily influenced during childhood by his family’s decision to sell his older sister into geisha house prostitution, where the subject of women's suffering is fundamental in all his work, none more so than this film which in effect mirrors the life of his own sister, thoroughly exploring the humiliating ramifications of a woman’s downward descent.  Tanaka is nothing less than brilliant, where the psychological depth of her performance continuously adds unspoken complexity, becoming the dramatic heart of the film without ever relying on melodramatic sentiment, following up her performance by becoming Japan’s second female director, after Sakane Tazuko, in a film called LOVE LETTER (1953).         

Told nearly entirely in flashback as Oharu reflects upon her life, Mizoguchi examines with some scrutiny the effects of male dominated rule, where often marginalized, self-sacrificing women play a redemptive role in Japanese society, yet Oharu is cruelly informed in no uncertain terms that she can be “bought like a fish on a chopping board.”  Reduced to material goods that can be bought and sold, every woman in town is subject to an intense personal inspection when Lord Matsudaira (Toshiaki Konoe), whose wife is barren, is seeking a concubine for the purpose of bearing an heir to the family name.   The exact specifications desired make this one of the more pathetic, but also amusingly exaggerated sequences in the film.  Oharu meets a completely different kind of inspection from the Lord’s wife, Hisako Yamane, who coolly dismisses her at first at first sight in a beautifully extended shot, but her enraged jealousy is plain enough to see, carrying into an operatic Bunraku sequence, after which she produces a son, but is quickly told to pack her bags as she is “draining” the Lord’s energy.  The film is not entirely downbeat, where some of the novel’s comic elements have been retained, such as a big-spending counterfeiter who visits the brothel, or an overly proud woman whose wig is cleverly stolen by a cat, but the tone of the film mostly goes from bad to worse.  This cycle of temporary appreciation before being ultimately discarded repeats throughout the film, as this pattern nearly defines the life of a prostitute, whose value is exceedingly high during their blossoming youth, but fades quickly as they age, “As the story goes, the morning's pretty face is a corpse by evening.”  Finding a way to heighten the reality of every scene, expressing tremendous sympathy for women, Mizoguchi’s film composition was never more stunning, as the film exposes a crisis of conscience in postwar Japan, examining Oharu’s painstaking mistreatment as a way of seeing their way through some kind of reconciliation and national accountability, using socially relevant material to examine historical patterns of behavior that could use a revised outlook, replacing ingrained social injustice with a modernized, more equitable vision towards the future.

A Hen in the Wind (Kaze no Naka no Mendori)

A HEN IN THE WIND (Kaze no Naka no Mendori)               A-
Japan  (84 mi)  1948  d:  Yasujirō Ozu

A rarely seen, postwar Ozu film depicting Japan as a moral wasteland, a film haunted by the regrettable actions of the past, showing great difficulty finding reconciliation within one’s own life.  Shot just three years after the war ended while still under the American occupation, the sound of industrial reconstruction can be heard throughout, showing signs of rebuilding both outwardly and inwardly, reminiscent of Antonioni’s RED DESERT (1964), which uses a similar industrial sound design to show how humans have been alienated by modernization.  This film is unlike any other Ozu film, as it shows the damaging psychological effects of the brutality of war, including disturbing behavior within a marriage that includes a rape and domestic violence.  The wrenching melodrama might seem more at home in a Mizoguchi film, but Ozu does an expert job framing and editing the scenes.  Set in the cramped quarters of a rundown factory district, the film is bookended by images of a gigantic, unfinished steel frame that looms high above the populace that resembles a roller coaster ride at an amusement park, but is more likely the leftover ruins of something that once stood there, but was demolished during the war.  Tokiko (Kinuyo Tanaka), along with her young son, live in a rented second story room up the narrow stairs in someone else’s home, in desperate financial straits while her husband Shuichi (Shuji Sano) has been away from home for the past four years serving in the Japanese Army.  Having sold nearly her entire wardrobe, including her last ceremonial kimono’s, she has nothing left to pay for the needed hospital care when her son falls seriously ill.  At the advice of one of her benefactors, Madame Orie (Reiko Mizukami), who bought her last kimono, she agrees to take a customer at a local house of prostitution in order to pay the bill, an event taking place entirely offscreen, where the audience sees a friendly card game with American jazz playing in the background and only hears about it afterwards when she painfully confesses her shame to one of her friends. 

Similarly, the husband’s war efforts are also offscreen, so Ozu makes no effort to dramatize the actions that drive the narrative, as they speak for themselves.  Instead he delves into each individual’s personal reaction to this blunt trauma, where Tokiki couldn’t be more ashamed, especially having waited faithfully for her husband all those years, not wanting to upset him and cause more strain when he comes home, but that’s exactly what happens, as no sooner does Shuichi arrive back home, but he grows defiantly distant and angrily suspicious, losing faith in his wife, finding her actions incredulous, grilling her with incessant questions about exactly where she went, curious about the kind of man she was with, eventually raping her in a dark corner before getting up and leaving in the middle of the night.  This marital tension contrasts with the earlier pastoral scenes of Tokiki walking to the riverside with her son, spending her afternoon having a picnic watching her son play in the high grass as she watches the boats go by in a timeless reverie waiting for her husband to return from the war.  Shuichi literally walks through the debris and burnt out ruins of war, where signs of demolition are everywhere, but Ozu uses corroding cylinders lying on the ground as new lens or prisms to see through, where people can be seen passing by in the distance, which is simply a different or new way of looking at something.  Shuichi finds the house of prostitution, pretending to be a client, asking about someone resembling his wife’s description, learning she worked an evening but never came back, before a young 21-year old is sent to his room, Fusako (Chiyoko Fumiya).  In one of the scenes of the film, the brothel is across the courtyard from an elementary school, where a children’s choir can be heard through the open windows.  Shuichi chides the young woman for her choice of profession, suggesting she needs the willpower to do more with her life.  When Fusako acknowledges she once attended the school, Shuichi leaves her money and quickly leaves the premises.      

In an empty landscape overlooking the river, the two meet again, as Shuichi is sitting alone collecting his thoughts when Fusako joins him, as she often takes her lunch there.  Without acknowledging anything, it’s clear Shuichi is struggling to understand the young woman, and in doing so, his wife, understanding perhaps for the first time how women (like men in the Army) are often forced into undesirable work, often against their will, enduring great hardships for little gain.  With a backdrop of Japan’s defeat in the war, this is heady stuff, as it’s a poetic recapitulation of a loss of noble purpose that had been used to justify the war, where in the end survival is all that matters.  In one of the more highly original cinematic expressions, Shuichi is having a discussion with his employer trying to find a job for Fusako while the slightly clouded and unclear windows behind them reveal a couple’s dance class taking place with American jazz playing softly in the background, where his boss notices Shuichi is ready to forgive the young girl, but not his wife.  It’s clear the war has left him a battered and bruised man, where he takes out his own frustrations on his wife.  Even as we sense he’s ready to forgive her, when he hears her apologetic pleas, it recalls his sense of dishonor and shame at their agonizing humiliation, and loses it, throwing her down the stairs.  Out of shame, Tokiki lies to the landlady, claiming she clumsily fell down the stairs, a desperate act to protect what’s left of the marital sanctity and their honor, even as they’ve been forced to lead such broken lives.  Her fall is prefaced by an earlier moment when Shuichi angrily kicks a tin can down the stairs, where the sound reverberations play in our heads as we recall the can noisily falling down the stairs.  The image of Tokiki slowly pulling  herself back to her feet and limping up those stairs, with what appears to be a sprained or broken ankle, while her husband simply watches and stares in amazement, offering no help whatsoever, is an unsettling reminder of the painful difficulties that lie ahead, a reflection of the broken spirit of the nation that must heal itself from the disastrous ruins of war.  This disturbing finale is heartbreaking for its lack of resolution, as there remains unfinished business at hand.  The unusual openness in exposing the disgrace and humiliation of defeat in this film led to Kurosawa’s STRAY DOG (1949), another national reconstruction film that becomes an extension of the nation’s quest for identity and a restoration of moral order.