This feels in some ways like a film custom-made for me, but then again I do love a boldly non-naturalistic widescreen film with saturated colours, expressive lighting, and a grimly moralistic fable structure. This Japanese film is somewhat akin to Hollywood musicals of the era (or works like Black Narcissus, or Rohmer’s later Perceval le Gallois) in its commitment to soundstage filming that’s not attempting to mimic reality but heighten it in specific ways. What Kinoshita adds here is the further distance of a kabuki like staging, introduced by a black-masked narrator who shows up throughout on the soundtrack, not always with anything much to add. There’s a proscenium effect too through transitions in which a backdrop, clearly painted onto a curtain, falls to reveal a new scene, or expressionist changes in lighting and colour to highlight a new scene or passage of time, but none of this ever feels stagy because of the fluid and elegant camerawork.
The story itself deals with a villager living in a time of enormous poverty, in which tradition was to take anyone aged 70 up a mountain and abandon them. In this case, it’s his mother Orin (played by the great Kinuyo Tanaka, almost unrecognisable). It’s unclear if this was ever a real practice, but it has informed a number of films, like the 1963 Korean film Goryeojang (similar in many respects, but in black-and-white) or Shohei Imamura’s 1983 remake that won the Palme d’Or (and which I haven’t seen, but by all accounts it doesn’t spare the viewer from some of the more brutal scenes that are elided in Kinoshita’s rendering).
The bleakness of the worldview is somewhat effaced by the beautiful colours and elegant staging, but the emotional core of the movie is on that poster image, as the mother is taken up the mountain in the dead of winter, and it lands pretty effectively given the hypocrisy of some of her family members (a spiteful grandson, for example) and her own great forbearance that’s contrasted with fellow villagers. This is a remarkable film.
CREDITS
Director Keisuke Kinoshita 木下惠介 (based on the novella by Shichiro Fukazawa 深沢七郎); Cinematographer Hiroyuki Kusuda 楠田浩之; Starring Kinuyo Tanaka 田中絹代, Teiji Takahashi 高橋貞二, Danko Ichikawa 三代目市川團子, Yuko Mochizuki 望月優子; Length 98 minutes. Seen at home (Blu-ray), Melbourne, Sunday 14 April 2024.
filmcentric 