DVD Review Of
Sansho The Bailiff
One of the nostra about Japanese film director Kenji Mizoguchi is that he
is ‘the most Japanese of all filmmakers.’ Another is that, compared to his
two titanic contemporaries, Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, Mizoguchi was the
hardest to pin down in a style or genre. Having just watched his 1954 film Sansho
The Bailiff (Sanshô Dayû) I can agree with both of the above
sentiments, for Mizoguchi excels at the jidai-geki (historical drama)
genre. Furthermore, I can do so after having seen just one other Mizoguchi film,
Ugetsu Monogatari. Whereas Ugetsu is spiritual and poetic, Sansho
is worldly and realistic. This despite the fact that the source materials for
the film (legends and short fiction) are rife with supernatural overtones.
The screenplay was written by Fuji Yahiro, and adapted from the legend
and a 1915 short story, Sansho The Steward, by Ogai Mori. Reputedly,
Mizoguchi wanted the film to more closely follow the titular character, rather
than the brother and sister who dominate the film. And while that would have
been a more daring choice (the equivalent of focusing on the Big Bad Wolf rather
than Little Red Riding Hood) the Daiei Studio’s insistence on exploring the
brother and sister tale of Zushio (Masahiko Kato) and Anju (Keiko Enami) allowed
Mizoguchi to add layers of psychological depth and realism to what had always
been little more than a Japanese fairy tale. That said, the screenplay is
outstanding, even if it is a bit depressing. It reminded me, in its unending
emotional declension, of Theo Angelopolous’s Trilogy: The Weeping Meadow.
The narrative is set in about the Tenth or Eleventh Century (its dates
are never specified), and is not that complex, but how it is portrayed visually
adds much depth to the spare tale. The siblings open the film in flight with
their mother, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), and an elderly servant, Ubatake (Chieko
Naniwa) after six years in exile from the province, Mutsu, their father, Taira
Masauji (Masao Shimizu), was once governor of. He was deposed because he opposed
the way his peasants were being treated. The tale veers between the present
flight of the family and six years earlier, when the father bestowed upon Zushio
a family heirloom, a statuette of Kwannon, the Goddess of Mercy, and this
advice: ‘Without mercy, man is like a beast. Even if you are hard on
yourself, be merciful to others. Men are created equal. Everyone is entitled to
their happiness.’
The family then is offered refuge from a night in the cold, and filled
with bandits and slave traders, by a Shinto priestess (Kikue Mori). At first, it
seems that the priestess is a mercy of angel, even offering the family a trip on
a boat to visit their exiled patriarch. Instead, she betrays them to boatsmen
who are slavers- the mother ending up on the boat, and becoming a courtesan on
Sado Island, and the children on another boat, sold as slaves on Sansho the
Bailiff’s manor. The old servant lady is knocked overboard and drowns. While
that is a minor moment, it does highlight one of Mizoguchi’s techniques. He
fades away from the old lady just before she drowns, as if he has no interest in
endings, only the means to them.
Bad critics often make a key critical misinterpretation of the film at
this moment. When we are finally introduced to Sansho (Shindô Eitarô) we see
he is clearly cruel and abusive- an Oriental Simon Legree, but we also see him
as a servile functionary to his boss, the Minister of the Right, the real owner
of the property. Sansho, after all, is just a bailiff for the big man. Yet, many
critics see him as the ultimate evil in the film, and also as somehow corrupt.
This is true, in the sense that he is ethically bankrupt on a personal level,
but most critics do not use the word in that sense. Rather they use it to imply
he is an anomaly in the system. Yet, clearly this is not true. He is just doing
his job, one which allows him to indulge his sadism, but it is the system that
is corrupt. Sansho, however, is such an efficient master of the manor that the
Minister sends other government officials to see how he runs things so that his
methods can be exported to other slave manors in the Empire. Against the
backdrop of the feudal system, Sansho is not corrupt, but the embodiment of
merciless capital efficiency. He is an early forerunner to the faceless
‘company man.’
The children are befriended by Sansho’s son, Taro (Akitake Kono)- a
kind but impotent man, and an older woman, Namiji (Noriko Tachibana), who acts
as a surrogate mother for them. Meanwhile, their real mother repeatedly tries to
escape from Sado Island, only to be brutalized. Taro, however, escapes his
father’s world, to try and change the slave system. He is also the one who
gives the children new names: Zushio is called Mutsu-Waka and Anju is called
Shinobu, to hide their pasts. Ten years pass, and Anju (now played by Kyoko
Kagawa) still dreams of reuniting with her family, while Zushio (now played by
Yoshiaki Hanayagi) hardens and turns cruel to other slaves. When a new
slave girl from Sado island is captured, she sings a song of grief that mentions
Zushio and Anju. When Anju hears this she realizes it was a song her mother
sang, which became popular on Sado island. She now wishes to escape more than
ever, but Zushio refuses, until the children are ordered to dispose of the body
of the dying Namiji. There, reminded of earlier times with their mother, Zushio
agrees to escape. Anju says she will stall the guards as long as he takes Namiji,
who was to be left to die in the woods. When the guards discover Zushio is gone,
they have an old woman watch Anju as they pursue him. The old woman allows Anju
to tie her up so she can escape, but Anju drowns herself in a nearby lake so she
cannot be forced to betray her brother. Her death scene, which seems unnatural
to modern sensibilities, is nonetheless very moving, and shot from behind, as
Anju slowly descends in the misty lake.
Yet, what makes this whole filmic passage work so well is not only that
its is staged, acted, and shot well, but that it is an almost moment by moment
(if not exact shot by shot) recapitulation of the earlier passage where the
children camp out with their mother and Ubatake before the priestess betrays
them to the slavers. This allows the viewer to not only understand what Zushio
is feeling when Anju reminds him of the earlier moment, but literally evoke its
imagery along with him. In both passages the duo is in the wild, they break
branches from a tree- with Zushio aiding his weaker sister. Earlier, the family
heard the calls of wolves, but now the siblings hear the song of their mother.
There is a bit of confused logic in the scene when Anju refuses to run with her
brother, claiming she’ll slow him down, but then insists he take the ill
Namiji, yet that can be rationalized as part of Anju’s humanistic bent, as
well as her following the dictates of her father’s teachings, something which
this scene and audience shared memory with the characters, reawakens in Zushio.
Having seen her brother ‘return’ to himself, Anju’s suicide takes
on a more noble ring to it, especially considering that her society did not
frown upon the practice. Also, the fact that the death scene is one long shot,
from behind, heightens the tension the viewer feels because a) it takes a while
for Anju to descend, and b) we never get to see her face and the horror she must
be feeling. Imagining that is more terrifying than showing it. Meanwhile, Zushio
takes refuge in a nearby Imperial temple, where the local priest, his old mentor
Taro, now bald, resides. There he aids Namiji with some medicine, and tells
Zushio that his quest to free the slaves is likely doomed, for Taro had failed
years earlier. Whereas Taro is shown as nothing but kind, he is also implicitly
indicted as a benign enabler of the corrupt system of slavery. Indeed,
Buddhism’s whole idea of simply being is shown as a cowardly reaction to evil.
taro sums up his benign complicity with this warning to Zushio: ‘Humans
have little sympathy for things that don't directly concern them. They’re
ruthless. Unless those hearts can be changed, the world you dream of cannot come
true.’
Through a series of coincidences, Zushio makes it to Kyoto, and is
befriended by the local Imperial head, Prime Minister Morozane Fujiwara (Ken
Mitsuda), who makes him governor of Tango province, where the Sansho manor lies.
Ironically, the PM only listens to Zushio because of his past status and
connection to his own clan. Before this was revealed to him, because it was his
clan which gave Zushio’s the statuette of Kwannon, Zushio was just another
peasant he ignored. In his new post, Zushio immediately bans slavery on
government and private lands- for Sansho’s manor is private property, and he
only runs it for the Imperial Minister of the Right, who also resides in Kyoto.
When Sansho refuses Zushio’s orders, and has his overlords take down the
governor’s decrees, Zushio arrests and bans Sansho from the province, freeing
the slaves, who burn down the manor house, and joy at their freedom. Zushio,
however, learns that both his sister and father, whom he has not seen for
sixteen years, are dead.
Initially, Zushio’s advisors feel that his edict will hurt him, but
after banishing Sansho they grow a deep respect for him, and are crushed when he
resigns his post, and sojourns to Sado island to find his mother. He finds a
courtesan with the same alias his mother used, but she is too young. He then
comes upon a beach where he has learnt his mother was killed in a tsunami two
years earlier. He wanders until he finds an old blind woman singing the Zushio
and Anju song. He realizes it is his mother, who rejects him as a trickster, but
is then convinced he has returned. He weeps when he tells them his father and
sister are dead and that he has not always followed his father’s teachings.
His mother says he is speaking nonsense, for had he not followed his father’s
edicts they would not be reunited. The camera then pans off to the left and
looks over the beach and the sea, things far larger and grander than the human
element.
The film truly evokes human growth potential at a root
level. Zushio feels, through much of the film, that it is Anju who is the force
he must rely on, yet, it is only after her death that he is emboldened enough to
do all the courageous things he does. And the stellar cinematography by Kazuo
Miyagawa only adds to the film. Rarely does a film so totally rely on a single
element as this does. In Sansho, it is the diagonal placement of spears,
branches, and other objects to bisect the screen, as well as the use of many
shades of gray to suggest color where there is none. In a sense, this film
reminds me of a black and white version of Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Red
Desert, which used color in an emotive and narrative way the way Miyagawa
uses gray shadings in this film.
There is little wonder that this film won its year’s Silver Lion at the
Venice Film Festival- the third straight Mizoguchi film to do so, following Life
Of Oharu and Ugetsu Monogatari. The DVD, by The Criterion Collection,
is shown in a 1.33:1 aspect ration, and the print is nearly flawless, save for a
few scratches at the opening and closing credits. The disk also contains
interviews with film critic Tadao Sato, Mizoguchi’s first assistant director
Tokuzo Tanaka, and the actress who played the grown Anju, Kyoko Kagawa. There is
a film commentary track by Japanese literature professor Jeffrey Angles, which
is solid, focusing more on the historical roots of the mythos and how Mizoguchi
parallaxed his film against that past. Angles is at his best in this aspect, but
falters and gets a bit fey and didactic when trying to discuss the more
cinematic aspects of the film. He also, at his worst, is manifestly reading from
a prepared text rather than reacting to the images onscreen. The package is
rounded out by a booklet with an essay, The Lessons Of Sansho, by film
scholar Mark Le Fanu, and two print versions of the legend- Ogai Mori’s 1915
short story, and an earlier mythic tale.
Mizoguchi shows himself, in just the two films I’ve seen thus far, to
be far more daring in both subject matter and style than either of his two great
rivals, Ozu and Kurosawa. This alone does not make nor imply he is the greater
filmmaker, but it does stake out a territory that is his alone. There is,
indeed, more than just one way to achieve greatness, and Mizoguchi seems to have
tried many, yet his success seems hardly of the ‘throw a thousand darts and
get one bullseye’ sort.
Sansho The Bailiff is a great film, due to its realism, to the
point of going to the opposite end of a typical Hollywood ending, and also
because almost every second of the film serves a purpose that is later
elaborated upon. It is a flower whose opening bud seems eternal, and whose
interior can only be sniffed. Thus, I’d have to rate it a bit above Ugetsu
Monogatari, as great as that film was. This is because watching a film Sansho
The Bailiff makes one not only a happier viewer, but a better person. No, I
do not mean that in the trite sense so many PC commentaries imply; that its
humanist message of kindness over cruelty will ‘ennoble you,’ but in the
sense that all great art makes its audience better, for it does not merely tell
you something the art and/or artist feels the audience should know, but because
it actively stimulates a greater intellect by forcing the viewer to cogitate
upon it, not only as it unfolds but long afterwards. In this way, the artwork
aids not only its own existential meaning, but that of all other art to be
encountered after it. It is, in this way, truly transcendental, beyond the hokey
pseudo-Orientalist way the term is usually defined. Sansho The Bailiff
does this, and in spades, for it moves at multiple levels of consciousness- the
emotive, the intellectual, and that indefinable other that exists betwixt, to
move its percipient. It is a political film, yet one made with great subtlety,
that shows how dilemmas great and small are resolved and not, something that
both old and modern shrill Hollywood PC schlock (think Crash) are simply
unable or unwilling to do. Japanese or not, Mizoguchi left a masterful work of
art for all the rest of us to grow on.
[An expurgated
version of this article originally appeared on the Alternative
Film Guide website.]
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