SANSHO THE BAILIFF (79) (second viewing: 75)

Directed by: Kenji Mizoguchi (1954)

Starring: Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kinuyo Tanaka, Kyoko Kagawa

The Pitch: In feudal Japan, two children are separated from their family and brought up as slaves : the daughter recalls her father's dictum of compassion for others, but the son becomes infected by the brutality around him.

Theo Sez: Not a lot to say really, though anyone lamenting the peeling-away of the arthouse audience in recent years - as per those death-of-cinephilia rants that were all the rage at millennium's end - may like to ponder the fact that this certified arthouse classic, Venice prize-winner and cornerstone of 50s aestheticism also operates as a rip-roaring melodrama, not unlike the various lurid tales of Deep South slave plantations (the scene of the master's tender-hearted son being called upon, and refusing, to dole out punishment is specifically echoed in Charles Burnett's NIGHTJOHN) : one appreciates the narrative's internal rhymes and subtle anti-militarist message, but also its epic, one-thing-after-another eventfulness and the way it's jam-packed with plot twists. Indeed, the film's power lies exactly in the tension between delicacy and melodrama, exemplified in the way characters are set off against Nature, from the first shot - the family walking through the forest, dwarfed by an enormous tree trunk arching protectively across the frame - to the last (the camera craning up from the mother-son reunion to reveal the vast seascape beyond) : placid landscape surrounds the febrile emotions - above all in the beauty of still water, tempering two of the film's most intense sequences - preventing them from overheating but also tying in with the film's (otherwise rather simplistic) humanism. Injustice and inhumanity, what our heroes strive to overcome, are visualised as 'unnatural' or at least out of harmony with Nature, human conflicts put into perspective by the implacable trees and lakes around them - it's the opposite of something like L'HUMANITE, where beastliness is the natural order of things (people without compassion are less-than-human here). Not, perhaps, in the same class as UGETSU, but certainly a very vivid prose to its poetry ; plus, of course, a rattling good yarn - and you won't hear an audience (arthouse or otherwise) saying that about L'HUMANITE. [Second viewing, April 2009: Didactic plot less impressive this time round, though the visual beauty - not just beauty, but harmony and proportion in every shot - is untarnished. Also a film of earth and water, the ratio between the two approximately equal to the ratio between vigorous prose and ethereal lyricism, or the ratio between the cruel, brutal world and its small oases of kindness (is the final shot meant as a visualization of the two philosophies, like two rocky outcrops separated by a chasm with the sea flowing between them?). Just wish the plotting didn't leave me wondering why the sister has to sacrifice herself, and why - if it's to help her brother escape faster - she saddles him with having to carry the old woman, and how the other old woman hopes to make Sansho believe the sister tied her up and escaped without any help. I know, I shouldn't...]