Sansho the Bailiff - Criterion Collection (1955)

You cannot compare us to peasants!

What an utterly spectacular movie. It's billing as the greatest movie ever made is completely fitting. The fact that Mizoguchi directed the beautiful Ugetsu the previous year is a phenomenal achievement. Unequaled really, throughout the history of film. Bold statement, to be sure, but one I firmly believe.
After a compassionate governor disobeys the tyrannical lord's orders, he is cast into exile. His family suffers horribly--his wife is physically forced into a life of prostitution; the kids forced into slave labor.
This is a heartbreaking story, but also so rich and moving. Mizoguchi uses his trademark long takes and sweeping camera movement. The images he captures are so precise and elegant. The final product is entertaining, simplistic, and mesmerising. For serious fans of cinema, this is one you'll want to watch again immediately. It doesn't get any better. July 5, 2008

Fantastic Acting, Fantastic Cinematography, Fantastic Message!

Director Kenji Mizoguchi once dropped his shirt and exposed his back to a colleague. There were two scars that were the result of razor slashes. He got it from a prostitute he was seeing. Mizoguchi said, "you see these? Until you get them, you are not allowed to make any movies about women."

Mizoguchi combines his lifelong focus on the theme of women's plight, with fantastic photography and top-shelf acting in this dazzling film of sheer cinematic craft.

Not a single frame is wasted. If you randomly picked any scene from the movie, the composition will be classically proportioned. Negative space is gorgeously balanced to a T and the lighting is absolutely iridescent. Sansho is a two-hour seminar on photographic composition. With each scene, I asked myself, "How long can Kazuo Miyagawa (cinematographer) keep this up? Nobody can be that good consistently!"

I stand corrected. Up until the final frame, every shot is spectacularly composed.

The story is about a family split up by vicissitudes and crooked people. Armed with only a two-sentence precept, a child must endure a life of slavery and cruelty before he attempts escape in order to re-unite his once noble family. The humane story is beautifully acted, reaching a level of conviction that one almost feels it's a real life consequence. The speech when Yoshiaki Hanayagi announces the end of slavery in the compound is so intense, you feel the madness radiating off the screen where human beings are indentured in chains. Mizoguchi's indigenous Japanese style shines under his always sympathetic narrative of women's condition in olden times.

One of the handful of movies that actually brought tears to my eyes. As the classical motif of a woman singing a plaintive chant, longing to be reunited with loved ones is an often repeated image in Japanese folk music. Also for me, there is no message greater than the one presented here: the importance of the humane act as a moral code of conduct.

Watching this movie just made me more painfully aware of the sad fact that once there existed a society that made such carefully crafted films, and after all these decade, all these technological leaps, and all the human inflicted atrocities we have seen, that craft is all but lost in the loud bombastic CGI-manipulated special effects of Hollywood creations.

May 13, 2008

Tough going but worth every minute

Kenji Mizoguchi directed some of the greatest films of the 1950's, Ugetsu, Princess Yang Kwai Fei, Street of Shame, but none better than this dense, unpredictable, almost unbearably sad masterpiece. Sansho the Bailiff is such a beautiful-brutal, poetic-gritty, simple-complex, uplifting-devastating epic journey from death into life, or maybe half-life at best, but life nonetheless, that most other films seem puny, insignificant in its wake, mere movies whereas Sansho the Bailiff is a supreme work, not only of art but of humanity.

When I saw Sansho a year ago at Columbus' Wexner Center for the Arts it was one of the most powerful film-going experiences in my life. Unfortunately, a pretty measly crowd was on hand while just a few weeks later, in the very same theater, a full house avidly sat through Jacques Rivette's trivial Celine and Julie Go Boating. Apparently modern arthouse audiences prefer snide, tacky irreverence and crass pretentiousness to heartfelt human drama. Their loss. Sansho the Bailiff doesn't get the same praise or press as Citizen Kane, Vertigo or The Rules of the Game but it is clearly in the same league. By the time the lights went up in that theater in Columbus, I was speechless. Watching it again on Criterion's gorgeous DVD edition, I felt the same impact. Strike that, I did manage to utter one word once the film was over, and that word was "Wow." It's still hard for me to believe that such a sublime and nearly perfect work of art even exists, not only that but that it belongs to the medium of film, a format that too often underestimates its own ability to elicit genuine awe, that too often settles for tawdriness and stupidity.

What makes this such a remarkable film? It's hard for me to put into words but I'll try. Sansho is a film of stark contrasts, with scenes of unsurpassed poetic beauty side by side with moments of cringe-inducing brutality and inhumanity to rival even Schindler's List. Tamaki and her family traveling through a field of tall, wavering flowers. Tamaki being forced onto a boat by bandits, ripped from her children so they can be sold into slavery. Anju slowly, delicately disappearing into a pool of water to die. An old man screaming as he is held down and his forehead is branded. Watching Sansho the Bailiff, the viewer continually gets the feeling of being kicked in the gut, yet is constantly overwhelmed by Mizoguchi's timeless imagery, his humility and deceptive simplicity of character, of style, his sense of the poetic effect of a single image, the way he allows music and pacing to create a haunting, ethereal mood that leaves an indelible impression, most of all the way he finds spirituality in the most abject suffering. That's about as much as I can say because Sansho is the type of film that defies intellectual analysis, deconstruction, it connects with the viewer on a deeply emotional level, more than that, it communicates to the viewer, in its own unique way, sometimes subtle and sometimes overbearing, what it means to suffer and persevere and sacrifice and love, in short what it means to be human. No other film affects me this way, and I consider myself fortunate for having experienced it.

Sansho the Bailiff isn't my favorite film. Either La Dolce Vita or Lawrence of Arabia would occupy the number one slot in my personal hall of fame. But if a person came up to me and said that Sansho the Bailiff is the greatest movie ever made, I probably wouldn't argue with him, because Mizoguchi's masterpiece is more than just a film, it's an experience. Watch it, and experience it for yourself. February 24, 2008

Mizoguchi's masterpiece

This is believe it or not only the second film by Kenji Mizoguchi to be commercially released in the United States. The first was "Ugetsu," but I think "Sansho the Bailiff" is the better film. Why has this Japanese master's films become so relatively forgotten, when his contemporaries Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu are so acclaimed? Well, for one, I think it's because Mizoguchi's films have a strong Buddhist overtone. Redemption through suffering, forgiveness, and acceptance of a life after death are all themes that Mizoguchi returned to time and again. This gives his films a mystical, surreal quality, but his films are also filled with very graphic scenes of human suffering that are hard to watch. In "Sansho the Bailiff", for instance, we have to witness disobedient slaves being branded by a hot iron.
The rest of the film is no less grim. It starts off as a kind governor is sent into exile, but not before telling his children, "Man without mercy is a beast." Before long, his wife (Kinuyo Tanaka) is separated from her children Zushio (Yoshiaki Hanayagi) and Anju (Kyôko Kagawa). They are travelling when a seemingly kind priestess offers them shelter, and then betrays them. The wife is sold into prostitution, the children to slavery. The children have a cruel slavemaster, Sansho the Bailiff (Eitarô Shindô). The film is really a test of whether the children can retain their humanity in such cruel surroundings.
Although "Sansho" is very hard to watch in places, Mizoguchi also manages to find a lot of beauty and poetry amid the suffering. One is the mother's eery lament for her children: "Zushio! Anju!" becomes a refrain throughout the movie, as the children are separated from their mother both physically and spiritually. Another is an overhead shot of the brother and sister trying to break off a branch from a tree early in the film. The same shot is used again later in the film, under much sadder circumstances. As in "Ugetsu," Mizoguchi uses shots of lakes and rivers to great effect.
Criterion's packaging is excellent. The booklet includes two Japanese fables that were the inspiration for the movie. It's interesting to see what parts Mizoguchi changed. The subtitles are clear and easy to read, and there's an informative commentary track. The best is interviews with Kanaka and Kagawa, who seem to indicate that Mizoguchi's idea of "life is suffering" extended to his fanatically perfectionist directing style as well. February 22, 2008

Powerful in its Simplicity

"There is comfort in the strength of love;
Twill make a thing endurable, which else
Would overset the brain, or break the heart"

-William Wordswoth
"Michael"

Sansho the Bailiff tells the tried and true story of simple people's inherent dignity in the face of unspeakable hardship and cruelty. Using feudal Japan as a setting, Kenji Mizoguchi puts his protagonists through the worst sufferings imaginable. The father, a low level administrator, is banished for refusing to be cruel to his people. He sees the need for dignity and humanity in even the lowliest peasant and teaches his son this understanding. This need for decent people to be merciful runs like a vein through the entire movie. His wife and children try to find him and are waylaid by slavers. The mother is forced into prostitution and the children enslaved by the brutal Sansho who encourages cruelty in his overseers.

Even after a decade of slavery the children stick together and never lose hope of escape and reunion with thier parents. The mom sings her longing for her lost children in such a way as to be heartrending and haunting. Interesting to note the title role of Sansho the Bailiff is not particularly well delineated. His is more of a symbol of evil then any real attempt to provide a fully rendered portrait of a believable character. This is on purpose as the story is about how the mother and children cope with the evil Sansho represents.

Beautiful filming, masterful directing, excellent acting and a captivating heartfelt script make the simply story into a brilliant cinematic masterpiece. Mizoguchi is finally, little by little, getting his due as one Japan's great postwar directors along with Kurosawa and Ozu. January 10, 2008

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