to save the soul
by
Douglas Messerli
Fuji
Yahiro and Yoshikata
Yoda (writers, based on a story by Mori Ōgai), Kenji Mizoguchi (director) 山椒大夫
Sanshō Dayū (Sansho the Bailiff) / 1954
Critic
Anthony Lane’s comments about Kenji Mizoguchi’s 1954 film, Sansho the Bailiff pretty much sum up my own feelings after
watching this film the other day:
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 any-
thing 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.
The story actually begins as a voyage
by Tamaki, Zushiō, and Anju years after their husband and father’s exile, as
they attempt join him. In a region where they are told bandits and slavers
abound they can find no inn for the night, and are forced to camp out-of-doors.
There they encounter a seemingly kind priestess who invites them into her home;
but the next day, she insists that they should continue their trip by boat in
order to protect them; when they meet their carriers, however, we quickly
realize that they have been betrayed, as the mother is separated from her two
children, she to be sold into prostitution, the children sold to Sansho as
slave labor.
Immediately the children are set to hard
work, with only the kindness of other slaves and the caring Tarō to protect
them. Tarō, to whom the children finally confess their identities, cautions
them they must work hard and bear the suffering so that they might later find a
way to escape. Meanwhile, disgusted with his own father’s treatment of his
slaves, Tarō, himself, leaves, hoping in Kyoto to find someone to hear his
complaints.
The children grow up, behaving, as I
mention above, in opposing ways, Anju retaining the lessons of her father,
while Zushiō submits—in a manner not so dissimilar to the Jewish capos and
workers in the Nazi camps in World War II—to the orders of his other superiors.
With regret, Zushiō leaves for a nearby
Imperial temple, while Anju, returning back to camp reveals that her brother
has escaped. As Sansho’s guards rush in chase of the escapee, Anju once again
leaves the camp to walk into a nearby lake and drown herself so that, if
tortured, she cannot reveal her brother’s destination.
When Zushiō suggests he will outlaw
slavery, however, he is reprimanded by the Advisor, and told that he has no
role over personal property, only public lands.
As Zushiō arrives in Tango, nonetheless,
he announces a ban of slavery on all lands, public and private, insisting, over
his assistant’s protests, that his soldiers close down Sansho’s estate.
Zushiō, having accomplished his goal,
resigns his position, traveling to Sado, the island to where his mother has
been taken to become a courtesan. There he finds another woman who has taken on
his mother’s name, but can find no woman in the house of his mother’s age. Told
that she had probably been killed in a local tsunami, he walks to the beach
where she must have died.
There he finds an old, blind woman singing
the same song his sister had heard. Recognizing her as his mother, he attempts
to tell her who he is, but she rejects him as a liar until he presents her with
the same statuette of mercy that has saved him in the past. Zushiō reports of
the deaths of both his father and Anju, as the two sadly fall into one
another’s arms—too late, obviously, to redeem either of their lives.
That is the story. But I have left
everything out. Mizoguchi’s film is so beautifully, yet simply, shot that
telling this tale is not as important as how it is visually represented. Along
with Fumio Hayasaka’s memorable musical score, the beautiful early scenes, as
the family attempt their long walk to reunite with their father, the terrible
vision of the split of their family into two boats, the scenes of loving
intimacy between Anju and her slave friend, Anju’s suicide by downing, the scenes
which show the yearning Tamaki, and hundreds of other frames of this film
literarily overwhelm the viewer with their beauty. There are very few
black-and-white films that one might describe as so ravishingly beautiful: Marcel
Carné’s Les Enfants du Paradis,
Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, and
Federico Fellini’s 8 ½ spring to
mind. Yet Mizoguchi’s film, with its simple moral premise that there are those
who abuse their fellow beings and a very few who manifest their love for the
world, has never been better revealed. Those who care, obviously, lose nearly
everything but their souls—souls which seem glowingly alive in Mizoguchi’s art.
Los Angeles, May
23, 2016
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