THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (68)

Directed by: Shohei Imamura (1983)

Starring: Ken Ogata, Sumiko Sakamoto

The Pitch: Life in a remote mountain village in 19th-century Japan, where food is scarce and the elderly - who can no longer earn their keep - are carried by their children to the top of Mount Narayama and left to die.

Theo Sez: A kind of flip side to THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS, finding little beauty or spirituality in the "simple life" and limning a village society of unremitting brutishness and primitivism - an animal existence (hence the frequent cutaways to insects, snakes, etc.) where hunger is a constant threat and the only relief from the pain of daily existence comes from sex (with a dog, when all else fails) and of course death, which is why the climactic trip up the mountain to the skeleton-strewn slopes of Narayama is so emotionally rich. Before that, the film's very pointed realism - the first thing we see anybody doing is taking a piss - is sometimes counter-productive, as when it insists on shooting with natural light in near-windowless houses; though in fact the murky look is vital to its single most powerful image, the villagers burying an entire family alive - swarming and swirling in the half-light, the only sound the crunch of shovelled dirt, they look like some Hell-vision out of Bruegel. It's a shame the rest of the film isn't always on that level - it's distinctive but not very illuminating, its insistent brutalism coming off as less complex or convincing than (say) Olmi's more compassionate approach. Oddly enough, its sole concession to the decorous detachment of traditional Japanese cinema - the fatalistic, philosophical grandmother, accepting Death with the dignity of an Ozu heroine - is also, as played by Sakamoto, its one unequivocal triumph.