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.

Floating Weeds (Ukigusa)

FLOATING WEEDS (Ukigusa)      B+                  

Japan  (119 mi)  1959  d:  Yasujirô Ozu

A man who is ungrateful is not a human being at all.         —Kichinosuke (Kôji Mitsui)

Following Hitchcock’s 1956 remake of his own 1934 film, The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Ozu followed suit where this story is virtually identical to the original, A Story of Floating Weeds (Ukigusa Monogatari) (1934), changing the setting from a remote mountain town in northern Japan to an island town in southern Japan, where the closeness to the sea offers not only a sense of reflection and longing, but some of the most beautiful shots in the film.  This is one of the few films in Ozu’s career that was not made by his parent Shochiku Film Studio where he was employed for thirty years, instead choosing the Daiei Motion Picture Company.  Perhaps one of the reasons was the opportunity to work with actress Machiko Kyô from Kurosawa’s RASHOMON (1950) and Mizoguchi’s UGETSU (1953), a longstanding member of the Daiei Production Company since 1949, while also availing himself the opportunity to work with Mizoguchi’s renowned cinematographer Kazuo Miyagawa who also happened to shoot both of those films.  For many viewers this may be the most beautiful film they’ve ever seen, even on a DVD Technicolor transfer, where what’s most startling about the remake is the brilliant use of color, the second of only six color films in his entire career, where every transitional composition is a stand-alone work of art literally saturated with color, offering a connected series of unforgettable still life images spread throughout the film, adding a heightened sense of drama to the portrayal of ordinary moments.  The story again follows the exploits of a barely surviving traveling theater company headed by Komajuro (Ganjirô Nakamura) and his lead actress Sumiko, Machiko Kyô, one of the greatest of all Asian actresses, brilliant and petulant as always, easily the best thing in this version.  Kôji Mitsui, who played the son in the original version, plays a fellow actor in the theater company, the only one in both versions.  The Floating Weeds of the title refers to the drifting quality of the wandering troupe itself, where Kyô's character in one of their plays refers nostalgically to a group of disbanding comrades as “roaming aimlessly to the end of the world.”   

The similarities between the films are endlessly comparable, from the arrival of a train to the arrival of a boat, from characters complaining of the rain to similar complaints about the heat, to the use of banners waving announcing the arrival of the theater in town, where there is even a similar humorous use of an introductory shaving sequence.  In this scene there is an intentional subtitle error, making humorous reference to internationally renowned Kurosawa actor Toshirô Mifune, though his name is never spoken, instead there is likely a reference to little known (outside Japan) Japanese actor Kinnnosuke Yorozuya.  The opening shot, however, recalls Kiarostami’s FIVE DEDICATED TO OZU (2003), a beautiful shot of the distant sea that juxtaposes the similar shapes of a lighthouse and a sake bottle to the chugging sounds of an unseen motor heard from a boat moving through the harbor.  Of interest, one slow moving shot from a boat at sea shows the lighthouse on the beach, the only moving camera shot in all of Ozu's color films.  The use of sound is immediately apparent in the choice of percussive theater music played by the actors as they arrive in town, accompanied by a wordless procession of marching children following them down the sidewalks and narrow streets, offering a unique claustrophobic intimacy with houses literally on top of one another, where the musical theme plays throughout like a recurring Nino Rota Fellini theme.  As this film is 35 minutes longer than the original, the dialogue is more extensive, allowing greater background detail than in a silent film, where the meeting between Komajuro and Oyoshi (Haruko Sugimura), the woman he left behind with a grown son Kiyoshi (Hiroshi Kawaguchi) who still thinks of him as his wayward uncle, accentuate a theme of growing old, where Komajuro fears she will become lonesome.  The overblown theatrical production itself shows Kyô interestingly playing a man’s role, reflective of exaggeration and a relatively crude form of old-fashioned populist nostalgia, where the audience largely consists of smoking grandparents and bored grandchildren continually munching on candy. 

When Sumiko gets wind of Komajuro’s secret visits to another woman, the conflict between the two is similarly expressed through a protracted argument on the street in the rain, where in each version he tells her “My son belongs to a better world than yours.”  The reason he’s never identified himself as the father is he’s too ashamed of his lowly position in life, where his only hope is that his son will not follow in his footsteps and instead get educated, where an entire new set of opportunities present themselves to him.  Like the original, there is an identical backstage scene of Sumiko sitting in front of a mirror applying kabuki makeup alongside actress Kayo (Ayoko Wakao, another frequent Mizoguchi actress, positively gorgeous seen here:  Full-size image), urging her to seduce Kiyoshi and poison his bright future.  One huge difference here is Oyoshi’s attitude, heartbroken and grief stricken in the earlier version, but more openly accepting of the circumstances here even after the possibilities of having a real family start to unravel.  Her acceptance of the loss and resignation that comes from living so many years as a broken family completely alters the tone of the finale, shifting the emphasis of the ending from bleak tragedy, even as it similarly takes place in an empty train station after the troupe has disbanded from financial hardship.  In the original, the psychological horror included the father’s humiliating realization that he could never be accepted as a real father because he abandoned his child for twenty years, creating an insurmountable emotional void, but while acknowledged, that’s not the emphasis here where the focus shifts from the tragedy inflicted upon the real mother to the abandoned theatrical mother, Sumiko, who has also been tossed out of her makeshift family and also finds herself childless and alone.  While this updated version features a gorgeously improved  aesthetic that is quite unlike anything else, the more concise original contains the superior storytelling, better acting, and a greater impactive sense of tragic loss, as the drama lags in this overlong version where time literally stands still, where the bittersweet sadness doesn’t come so much from the emptiness of opportunities lost, but from the vantage point of an aging, more mature man who can overlook the vast horizon that has been his entire life, knowing full well that life’s greatest fulfillments are likely behind and not ahead of him.