Sansho The Bailiff.
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. 1954
Starring Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa and Eitaro Shindo. Black and white. 124 mins. Out now on Blu-ray as part of the Criterion Collection.
The merits of simplicity should never be casually dismissed, but sometimes you can have too little of a good thing. Mizoguchi is rated alongside Ozu and Kurosawa as a great of Japanese cinema and the last Sight and Sound Asleep poll of the greatest films ever made had this up in the top 60. So I sit and watch and wait and wonder what the hell it is I am missing.
Based on an ancient Japanese folk tale, it is a tale of hardship and woe set in the feudal era. After a provincial governor loses his post for being too lenient with the peasants, his family pay a heavy price. They are cast out of their privileged positions and end up separated and stuck in miserable positions. The two children become slaves for the title character and we follow their attempts to survive, clinging to the hope that one day the family can be reunited.
They are spurred on by idealism and pain. Their father's entreaty that they should always be merciful is the film's moral code. Its heartbreaking sting is a song from their mother that the children overhear a newly arrived slave girl sing. The lyrics mention them by name and her intense longing for them.
Now, this is a strong and moving narrative, though a touch too Dickensian for my taste: it has that assumption that the deprivations of those that were once rich are somehow worse than those that are always poor. But it definitely stirs in the viewer the requisite rage at injustice and the use of a simple song to portray a bond that has endured decades of separation is intensely moving. But is this really a film that could lead New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane to say that he had emerged from seeing it “a broken man but calm in the conviction that I had never seen anything better,” and would not see it again because he didn't want to break the spell and didn't think he could weather such an ordeal a second time
These philistine eyes totally failed to see the exquisite perfection in the composition or the artistic purity. I just saw an old film with a melodramatic story that was very effective but really didn't seem like anything special. Sorry.
Extras
Audio commentary featuring Japanese-literature scholar Jeffrey Angles
Directed by Kenji Mizoguchi. 1954
Starring Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa and Eitaro Shindo. Black and white. 124 mins. Out now on Blu-ray as part of the Criterion Collection.
The merits of simplicity should never be casually dismissed, but sometimes you can have too little of a good thing. Mizoguchi is rated alongside Ozu and Kurosawa as a great of Japanese cinema and the last Sight and Sound Asleep poll of the greatest films ever made had this up in the top 60. So I sit and watch and wait and wonder what the hell it is I am missing.
Based on an ancient Japanese folk tale, it is a tale of hardship and woe set in the feudal era. After a provincial governor loses his post for being too lenient with the peasants, his family pay a heavy price. They are cast out of their privileged positions and end up separated and stuck in miserable positions. The two children become slaves for the title character and we follow their attempts to survive, clinging to the hope that one day the family can be reunited.
They are spurred on by idealism and pain. Their father's entreaty that they should always be merciful is the film's moral code. Its heartbreaking sting is a song from their mother that the children overhear a newly arrived slave girl sing. The lyrics mention them by name and her intense longing for them.
Now, this is a strong and moving narrative, though a touch too Dickensian for my taste: it has that assumption that the deprivations of those that were once rich are somehow worse than those that are always poor. But it definitely stirs in the viewer the requisite rage at injustice and the use of a simple song to portray a bond that has endured decades of separation is intensely moving. But is this really a film that could lead New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane to say that he had emerged from seeing it “a broken man but calm in the conviction that I had never seen anything better,” and would not see it again because he didn't want to break the spell and didn't think he could weather such an ordeal a second time
These philistine eyes totally failed to see the exquisite perfection in the composition or the artistic purity. I just saw an old film with a melodramatic story that was very effective but really didn't seem like anything special. Sorry.
Extras
Audio commentary featuring Japanese-literature scholar Jeffrey Angles
- Interviews with critic Tadao Sato, assistant director Tokuzo Tanaka, and actress Kyoko Kagawa on the making of the film and its lasting importance
