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 Idiot (Hakuchi)

Setsuko Hara

THE IDIOT (Hakuchi)              B                    

Japan  (166 mi)  1951  d:  Akira Kurosawa
Opening version (180 mi)  Extended cut (265 mi) 

I can't ruin the innocent life of a child like you.        

— Taeko Nasu (Setsuko Hara)

Kurosawa always enjoyed the challenge of filming great literary works, but certainly a Dostoevsky novel, The Idiot, presented immense challenges simply in length alone.  Transporting 19th century events from Saint Petersburg, Russia to the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido following WW II, the Christ-like protagonist Kameda is returning after being falsely charged with war crimes, initially sentenced to death which drove him into a mental breakdown where he continues to have harrowing dreams of his death, leaving him frail and susceptible to epileptic seizures, recovering in an American POW camp.  There’s an early scene in this film where Kameda, whose innocence and blunt honesty causes social awkwardness that leaves him known as the Idiot (Masayuki Mori, the slain husband from Kurosawa’s previous 1950 film ROSHÔMON), is walking through a snowy, tree-lined landscape with Yoshiko Kuga as Ayako, where one is immediately reminded of similar post card images from Orson Welles and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), two films that suffered similar fates, as they were both mutilated beyond recognition by the studio brass who felt the director’s four-hour version was unwatchable.  Kurosawa’s original cut was 100 minutes longer than the only surviving print and an hour longer than his highly successful later work SEVEN SAMURAI (1954), which suggests nearly 40 % of the original film is missing.  Nestled between two masterworks, there’s every reason to believe this was an epic adaptation, including an array of activities and developments that befit an entire host of novelesque characters, where Kurosawa turns this into a wrenching melodrama, but all we’re left with are fragments, which at times feel underdeveloped, perhaps resembling the tone and structure of one of Kameda’s fever-pitched dreams. 

Kameda meets Akama (Toshirô Mifune) on a train back home, two men who are exact opposites, as Kameda is penniless while Akama is wealthy beyond his means, a man who lets no one stand in his way and is as physically aggressive as Kameda is passive.  At the train station, they see a picture in a photography studio of Taeko, Setsuko Hara, who worked with Kurosawa previously in NO REGRETS FOR OUR YOUTH (1946), also several Ozu films including TOKYO STORY (1953), where the snowy mood on the streets is beautifully captured in a sequence here, even if it includes Russian dubbed dialogue 'The Idiot' (Akira Kurosawa) ("Однозвучно гремит  YouTube (3:33).  Kameda mysteriously breaks into tears as he sees the sadness in her eyes, as she’s been a kept women, the mistress of a wealthy businessman since the age of 14, and has obviously been visited by more men than she cares to remember.  She’s being sold into marriage for 600,000 yen at a dinner party when Kameda and Akama arrive in a blizzard of snow, where Akama offers a rival bid of one million yen on the spot.  This extended sequence runs the gamut in expressing tumultuous emotions, given a backdrop of insidious male behavior, female subjugation, and town gossip, as the deal is brokered by Ayako’s father, Takashi Shimura, who plays something of a slimeball in this picture, a rarity for him as he’s usually the noblest character onscreen.  But that part belongs to Kameda, who in a brilliant masterstroke after Taeko has melodramatically rejected all offers, drowning in her own sorrows, penniless and humiliated, claiming no one would want her now, quietly indicates he would accept her as she is, asserting that in his eyes, she remains a pure and faithful woman, which leads to a real contradiction of morals, as Taeko is stunned by this admission and truly touched at hearing it, as men have only wanted to dominate and control her.  Akama is stunned as well, wondering what business it is of Kameda to butt in on his offer, which he feels is just as genuine, amazed that his frail friend has suddenly become his biggest rival.  This masterful party sequence beautifully interweaves the lead characters and their relationship to one another, while also establishing the town’s inclination to ridicule Kameda.    

 

While offscreen, the two men attempt to win Taeko’s hand, but she regrets it can’t be Kameda, fearing her disgraced lifestyle would ruin him.  Meanwhile, Kameda has found a defender from Ayako, whose family is the picture of gossip and convention, whose father (Kameda’s uncle) is forced to admit he swindled Kameda out of his inheritance.  Liko Ozu, the master of intimate chamber works, Kurosawa uses signature shots which he repeats throughout the picture, that include shots of Kameda pacing out front of Akama’s immense home that is covered in snow hoping he’ll let him in, or a shot of Ayako sitting at the piano in front of a window in her home with snow pelting the glass pane.  Snow figures prominently in this version, beautifully capturing the architectural landscape of Hokkaido buried under layers of snow, where much of the narrative takes place in a blizzard, using a Godard-like interior and exterior expression, where a tracking camera captures documentary style street scenes in the snow, also reflected from interior shots looking out large windows, and where inside Akama’s dark, cavernous mansion are rooms filled with snow and ice, resembling images from DOCTOR ZHIVAGO (1965).  But the most outrageous of all is a wonderfully expressive outdoor ice carnival (can’t say there’s anything else like it), skaters wearing masks while carrying sparklers, all set to the frenetic music from Mussorgsky’s “Night on Bald Mountain,”  Mussorgsky-Stokowski "A Night on Bare Mountain" YouTube (9:47), at least partially captured in a short trailer sequence here The Idiot 1951 YouTube (1:03).  The finale pits both the two women and the two men against one another, where their fate seems to rest in each other’s arms, each a shadow figure of the other, where Setsuko Hara pulls off her best Joan Crawford imitation while Ayako, something of a caged bird, attempts to find her own wings, but it’s the haunting quiet of the men losing their grip in the darkness of Akama’s frozen mansion, turned into a living tomb, that is the most unsettling, reminiscent of the final apocalyptic father and son scene in DODES’KA-DEN (1970), where the presence of doom is everpresent, yet here its silence is unusually poetic, the gravity broken only by a brief and altogether unnecessary final coda.