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.
Although Mizoguchi characterizes the
story as a folktale, which has led some critics to describe it as a simple
story, I’d argue it is deeply complex, not just in its meanings, but in its narrative
pattern, and a great deal is expressed in what does not get told or said. What
we can say that is simple about this work is its morality: on the one side we
have the kind and merciful men such as the governor father, who at the
beginning of this historical drama is exiled for refusing to punish the
rebelling peasants under his rule; and on the other we have the cruel, greedy
Sansho who uses hundreds of slaves to attain his notoriety and wealth. In
between are most of the other figures, although it is clear that the governor’s
wife, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), his daughter Anju (Kyōko Kagawa), and Sansho’s
son, Tarō (Akitake Kōno) all attempt to follow the higher principles of life;
but even the governor’s loving son, Zushiō (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) wavers in his
commitment to the good, when, as a slave overseer, he brands a fellow slave for
having attempted to escape.
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.
One day, when a new girl appears, Anju
hears her singing a sad song that employs both her and Zushiō’s names; it is
immediately clear that the lament has been
sung by her own mother, who must, accordingly, still be alive and desperately
seeking her children. She encourages her brother to escape the camp with her,
but he dismisses her by questioning how they might survive without papers and
money.
Soon after, however, the two are sent out
to accompany the body of a dying worker—a woman who had befriended Anju—whom
they are ordered to leave in the woods to die. Anju begs the guard to let them
gather wood and rushes so that they might, at least, build a small roof over
her to protect her from frost. As the two work in gathering these materials, Zushiō
recalls the time years earlier when they had done the same thing for their stay
in the woods overnight with their mother. Suddenly he becomes determined to
escape; but Anju insists that he go alone, taking the elderly woman with him,
instead of her; she will provide a temporary ruse for his absence.
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.
At the temple, Zushiō discovers that the
head priest is none other than Tarō. Sansho’s son. The monks give the elderly
women medicine and hide the two as Shanso’s soldiers search to discover where
they might have gone. Determined to travel on to Kyoto to plea to the Chief
Advisor about the condition of the slaves, Zushiō begs Tarō to care for the
woman; Tarō, in turn, gives him papers to identity Zushiō to the Advisor. Yet Zushiō is denied entrance to the
Advisor’s palace, and even after slipping in undercover and confronting the
administrator, is taken away and imprisoned. Only after guards discover a
statuette of the god of mercy, given to him by his father, on Zushiō’s body,
does the Advisor agree to meet with him, telling him that his father has died,
while awarding him the governorship of Tango, the same province where Sansho
lives.
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.
They are met with justified
resistance—given the laws—but are defeated by Zushiō’s men. Zushiō, himself,
apologizes to the old man who he had formerly punished. But he also discovers
the fact that his sister has killed herself to protect him. As Zushiō and his
men leave, the freed slaves burn down Sansho’s house.
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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