I’ve been on something of a Japanese kick lately.
Last week, a friend and I attended a screening of Akira Kurosawa’s second-to-last film Rhapsody in August (1991) — a screening that was hosted by local author Douglas Coupland, who explained some of the reasons why he feels a personal connection to that film.
I appreciated the film on some levels, and I can see why it has such a personal significance for Coupland, but overall I found it too didactic. The movie is about several children visiting their grandmother, who lives near Nagasaki and lost her husband in the atomic blast that fell there in 1945; the children learn about the horrors of nuclear weapons, and somewhere along the way Richard Gere (in his first movie after 1990’s Pretty Woman) shows up as a relative who comes to Nagasaki to learn some things, too.
Alas, I didn’t have much invested in the characters as characters, so when the film comes to what should have been a powerfully emotional conclusion, it didn’t stir me all that much.
In fact, I found myself distracted by the composition of the images, and the way the characters run from the right side of the screen to the left in that final sequence (and in the video cover). Lately I have been thinking that, just as foreign dialogue needs subtitles, perhaps the visuals in movies from certain cultures should be flipped around, too. We English speakers are used to reading from the left to the right, so we “identify” with the left side of the screen in a way that we do not “identify” with the right side (have you ever noticed how the “good guys” in all those battle scenes typically rush in from the left side of the screen?). But the Japanese read from right to left (or at least, they used to), so presumably they arrange the elements within their frames in a manner that is precisely the opposite of what we would do.
Anyway, that’s a tangent, and probably deserves a post of its own.
Tonight, the Pacific Cinematheque showed a double-bill of Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954). Both films are excellent, and I really like the way Ugetsu mixes elements of ghost story and moral fable and period piece, etc., etc., but it is Sansho that really caught my attention this evening.
In some ways, the film’s narrative trajectory is reminiscent of Ben-Hur. (Note, there will be spoilers here.) While there are some major differences between the two stories, they both concern someone from the upper classes who is reduced to slavehood, but who then rises to an even higher social status — but after he gets his revenge, he ends up abandoning his newfound social status so that he can look for his mother who, by this point, has either been given up for dead or would arguably be better off that way.
The film is a little more complicated than that, not least because it is not clear who the protagonist will be. If you approach the film blind, keeping in mind Mizoguchi’s reputation as a “feminist”, you might think that the main character will be the woman who is compelled to travel with her two children by foot, after her husband is exiled. But after she and the children are separated by slave traders, the film jumps ahead ten years, and our main focus seems to become the woman’s daughter. But then the daughter leaves the picture and the story belongs to the woman’s son.
And hanging over all of this is the fact that the film is named after not a protagonist, but one of the main antagonists — a character who does not appear at all in the opening or closing reels.
There is a powerful scene where the daughter, Anju, meets a new slavegirl who recently worked in the city where Anju’s mother is said to have been sent. Anju has not seen her mother in ten years, so she asks the new girl if she knows a woman by a certain name, and no the girl doesn’t. But then the girl begins to sing as she settles into her work, and the song she sings is a sad tune about a woman looking for her daughter Anju and her son Zushiô.
The look on Anju’s face, as she listens to the song and takes it in, is extraordinary. The song is like a message from her mother — except her mother had no reason to believe her children would ever hear it. It’s a profoundly personal message — yet it has become something much more general, and it is now transmitted by someone for whom it is nothing more than something to sing while working. It occurred to me that many folk songs probably got their start in similarly personal circumstances, but are now just songs to us — so for Anju to hear an aspect of her life story immortalized and depersonalized like this, within her own lifetime, would be a little like getting a foretaste of her own death. The song produces deep feelings of connection, but of separation, too.
Turning to other themes, I would be interested in learning more about the film’s political and cultural influences. Zushiô’s father tells him that, without mercy, a person can’t be really human; and he also tells him that all men are created equal and every person has a right to happiness. Maybe something got lost in the subtitles’ translation, but these seem to me like very American concepts, lifted straight out of the Declaration of Independence. Does this reflect the influence of the American occupation of Japan after World War II? Or are there Japanese roots for this, too?
A significant subplot involves Zushiô’s determination to set all the slaves in his territory free, once he has been appointed the new governor. The way he goes about this is rather naive, when you think about it; he simply passes a law, imprisons Sansho, sets all of Sansho’s slaves free, then resigns from his government post before he has to deal with any of the consequences of his decree.
There is a scene of the slaves holding a wild, noisy paty in Sansho’s house before they burn it down, and it immediately reminded me of a similar scene in Spartacus (1960) — except in that film, the chaos of newfound freedom was just a transitional stage towards finding a greater sense of purpose. Likewise, one of the major themes of The Ten Commandments (1956) is that even liberated slaves need to be molded into some sort of functioning society — or else. And hasn’t the American experience shown that it takes more to set people free than an Emancipation Proclamation?
How many of Sansho’s slaves will know what to do with their freedom? And how will the elite of Japanese society respond when some of those slaves inevitably go too far? For Zushiô to unilaterally make all these sudden changes and then abandon his post is pretty irresponsible, and I am not sure whether the film wants us to see the irresponsibility for what it is, or whether it wants us to accept the liberation of these slaves on a more superficial, perfunctory level, as though it were a fairy tale.
Either way, this is definitely a good film, and one of those rare masterpieces where not a single frame is wasted. See it.
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