185 - The Ballad of Narayama, 1958, Japan. Dir. Keisuke Kinoshita.

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

185 - The Ballad of Narayama, 1958, Japan.  Dir. Keisuke Kinoshita.

Every frame a Kabuki.

Kabuki theatre, that is.

Artificial.  Highly stylized.  Filmed on 70 sets constructed inside sound stages.  Matte paintings as backdrops.  With theatrical lighting.  And man-made artificial trees.  Wide screen.

Elegant.  Lush.  Elegiac.  Lavish.

And melancholy.

This film retells an old folk legend about a mountain village where residents, upon turning 70, are required to ascend the summit of Mount Narayama and be abandoned to die.

My generation read Shirley Jackson's short story "The Lottery," where the death requirement was based on tradition.  And chance.

While this requirement may also be based on tradition, it also appears to be practical.  The remote village simply does not have the natural resources to provide for so many people.'  Therefore . . .

Forget playing Lifeboat.  Here the decision is made for you.  Everyone who turns 70 must go to die.

Of starvation.  Exposure.  Abandonment.

Currently, there are two citizens who have reached this age: the woman Orin and the man, her neighbor, Mata.

Orin faces her destiny with stoic resignation.  A kind of Hemingway grace under pressure.

Mata rebels.  He will not go gently up to that cold Mount.

It does not help that, while Orin's son Tatsuhei is loving and supportive, Mata's family is ready to cut him off. What?  You have not left yet?

Cut off from food, he comes to Orin herself, and she shares with him as he ravages her rice.

But while Orin's son is loving, her grandson is cruel.  He mocks her, making up a song that others begin to sing, and which spreads throughout the village until it becomes the local hit.

They sing.  They dance, They mock Orin for still having all 33 of her teeth.

They go so far as to push her into breaking her own teeth out of her mouth just to please them.

But they never stop singing.

The director of our film, Keisuke Kinoshita, was remarkably prolific and diverse.  He made forty-two films in the first twenty-three years of his career--just under two a year.  Then when the money grew scarce, he turned to television and kept working.

He had fallen in love with film as a teenager, and he ran away from home to pursue his dream.

Watching this film is like going to the theatre and seeing a musical.  In Japanese.  It feels fresh and original.  It even contains backdrops dropping to reveal new sets, onto which the camera then gracefully glides.

The camera jib movements feel somewhat akin to Max Ophuls in France, which we experienced earlier this year.  With a light touch and deftly smooth.

Orin is able to reciprocate her son Tatsuhei's love for her.  Before he takes her to the summit, she ensures that he will have a wife.  Both he and the woman are older, and widowed, and Orin provides that they will be able to marry after she is gone.  And she teaches her secrets to her never-to-be-experienced-as daughter-in-law, including her undisclosed source of trout.

You may or may not be moved to a spiritual catharsis as Aristotle describes it, but you will experience joy and beauty in the form to mitigate the injustice described by the content.