THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (1982)
"Old Orin was a lucky woman. Snow fell when she went to Narayama."
3.5 out of ****
Starring Ken Ogata, Sumiko Sakamoto, Tonpei Hidari, Seiji Kurasaki Directed & Written by Shohei Imamura Cinematography by Masao Tochizawa
Life is hard for the people on the mountain. Their late 19th century village is far from civilization, in northern Japan, and they struggle to subsist on the meagre fruits of the earth. Marriages are not decided by anything as frivolous as love, but rather by the need to survive, to perpetuate the species. Dead babies are dumped unceremoniously in a neighbour's rice field; living babies, especially girls, may be sold. Justice is swift and merciless; whole families may be brutally punished for a crime committed by one member.
People who live in a place like this need something to give them hope, something to provide structure and meaning for their hardships. For the people in this village, that something is Narayama. It is not clear, until near the movie's end, what exactly Narayama is, but we know it holds deep significance. A younger woman, seriously ill, laments that she may die without visiting Narayama. An older woman, nearing the age of 70, the age when people make the trip to Narayama, speaks of her impending journey with eagerness; she is so determined to go that she breaks off her front teeth, smashing them with a stone, to prove her health is failing and it is time for her to depart.
Ken Ogata (THE PILLOW BOOK, MISHIMA) has top billing in the film, but the centre of the story is his mother, Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto), the old woman readying herself to go to Narayama. Ogata plays her elder son, Tatsuhei, who is deeply concerned with his family's honour and his duties towards them--so much so that he does not much seem to enjoy life. The younger son (Tonpei Hidari) is a simple lad, with a rather poor sense of hygiene--so much so that no woman in the village will sleep with him, and he takes his pleasure from a neighbour's dog. Tatsuhei's son, Kesa (Seiji Kurasaki), has not yet learned the difficult truths that age will bring; he cavorts with young women of the village, impregnating one girl, with no heed for the consequences. A baby is not a happy addition to the home: it is an extra mouth to feed.
The first two-thirds of the movie observe Orin's life, and that of her family and their neighbours, during the months preceding her departure. We see her arrange for a woman to have sex with her younger son, making sure he has lost his virginity before she leaves; we see her subtly enforce the village's strong-arm justice, when she sends Kesa's pregnant girlfriend off to her family one night, knowing that they are to be punished for a crime her father committed. The punishment is shown in objective, horrifying detail, and is one of the film's most powerful moments. Imamura sometimes seems to view these people's lives as a long, miserable journey toward death, especially in moments of raw brutality like this dispensation of justice. There is beauty in the film, but it has little to do with the people. Scenes of animals copulating, hunting, preying on one another, are intercut with the villager's activities, and these are stirring images, as are various longshots of wilderness vistas, but they seem to show human life as at best an irrelevancy, at worst an embarrassment, in this primal world.
But the first part of the movie, somewhat confused and overlong, is merely preparation for the bravura finale, when we finally learn why the villagers regard Narayama with such reverence. Its location is a secret, conferred to Tatsuhei and Orin in a special ceremony, and the directions include going around a pond three times, passing through the Seven Valleys, that sort of thing. Tatsuhei and Orin undertake this near-mythic journey, and the film becomes a remarkable meditation on human mortality, a meditation achieved through powerful, simple images.
There are bold, visionary moments (which I will not reveal) in these closing scenes, but there are also quiet, intimate moments, equally significant. Tatsuhei comes upon an old, crude bridge, made of three planks; two of them are rotten and fall away at his touch, yet he is prepared to crawl across the one remaining plank, exhausted, feet raw and bleeding, Orin on his back, so that his mother can reach her goal. She says nothing, but taps him on the shoulder and motions for him to find another route. This moment, and what it says about their unspoken love for each other, is powerful. Later, they come upon other travellers headed for Narayama, a son carrying his father; the son treats the father in a peremptory, brusque manner, and then commits an act of shocking cruelty. There is no love, no respect, and the difference between this pair and Orin and Tatsuhei is, we sense, the difference between a life without meaning and a life with some meaning. It is nuances like this that earn a filmmaker adjectives like "great."
Shohei Imamura has been making films for 40 years now, and is indeed considered by some to be one of the world's great directors; as with many other great foreign directors currently at work, his films are difficult to find in North America, even though he is one of only three directors (the others being Francis Ford Coppola and Emil Kusturica) to have won two Palmes d'Or, one for this film and the other for 1997's THE EEL.
He is a difficult filmmaker, whose works offer no easy pleasures. His vision of the world is bleak and dark and pessimistic. He doesn't give his characters any lucky breaks, but, then, life hasn't given them any lucky breaks either. It is easy to dismiss him as a cold nihilist. But Imamura has taken it upon himself, throughout his long career, to explore the lives of the disenfranchised, to give them a voice, and there is more compassion in this choice than in a dozen exercises in cheap sentimentality. He considers the lives of people most filmmakers don't want to consider: the prostitute in THE INSECT WOMAN, the serial killer in VENGEANCE IS MINE, the radiation victims in BLACK RAIN, and a 70-year-old woman, nearing death in a remote mountain village. While he offers his characters few comforts, this makes the rewards they do earn all the more meaningful. Because we have seen a measure of the pain she has suffered, the peace earned by Orin at the end of THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA is truly profound, and so is the film.
A Review by David Dalgleish (March 16/98)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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