VICTIMS OF THE CRUELEST MAN IN FILM
Friday through Tuesday, the Gene Siskel Film Center is screening two 1954 masterpieces from the great Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi in new 4K digital restorations. ( The other is “A Story From Chikamatsu.”) Roger Ebert reviewed “Sansho” as part of his Great Movies series.
Kenji Mizoguchi’s “Sansho the Bailiff,” one of the best of all Japanese films, is curiously named after its villain, and not after any of the characters we identify with. The bristle- bearded slavemaster Sansho is at the center of two journeys, one toward him, one away, although the early travelers have no suspicion of their destination. He is as heartless a creature as I have seen on the screen.
The film opens on a forest hillside, where Tamaki, the wife of a kind district administrator, is discovered with her young son, Zushio, her younger daughter, Anju, and their servant, making their way down a difficult path. The dense underbrush here is reflected throughout the film, which is set in 11thcentury feudal times, and reflects the director’s feeling that humans and nature are the sides of a coin. The little group has had to flee for their lives after her husband drew the wrath of the cruel Sansho and was exiled. They hope to rejoin him.
They stop for the night and start a small fire. In the darkness, wolves howl. Their little domestic circle in the firelight is a moment of happiness, however uncertain, that they will not feel again. Then an old priestess finds them, and offers them shelter in her nearby home. In the morning, discovering their destination, she suggests that a boat journey will greatly diminish the distance. She knows some friendly boatmen. As they leave her house, a furtive dark figure darts behind them in the shrubbery.
The delivery to the boatmen is a betrayal. The woman and servant are captured by body merchants, the women to be sold into prostitution, the children into slavery under Sansho. He runs a barbaric prison camp of forced labor, and it here that the children will spend the next 10 years. Sansho is an unlovely man, a bully and sadist, who is sur- rounded by servile lackeys, all except for his son.
Flashbacks have shown us something of the captured children’s early life under their father, a good man who gave his son an amulet representing the Goddess of Mercy, and taught him that all men are created equal. That same familiar concept is enshrined in the Japanese Constitution, imposed by the American occupation in 1947 and still in force, not a word changed, 60 years later. When Mizoguchi made his film in 1954 the words must have been alive in his mind, reflecting his obsession with the rights of women throughout his career, and serving to condemn Sansho’s slave camp ( which mirrors those the Japanese ran in the Second World War). The story, we’re told in a prefatory note, took place in “an era when mankind had not yet awakened as human beings.” By that Mizoguchi may be referring both to the story and to aspects of traditional Japanese totalitarian society, in which everyone’s role was rigidly defined, and authority flowed from the top down.
As the plot unfurls, we see Zushio and Anju trying to escape, lured by an evocative song that is sung to them by a recent prisoner from their village, and echoed too in a bird cry: “Zushio, Anju, come back, I need you.” It is their mother’s ghostly voice. The film incorporates this mystical summons into images of startling cruelty under Sansho, who causes prisoners to be branded on their foreheads if they try to escape. One who does not agree with this practice is Sansho’s son, Taro, and it is an irony of the film that while Taro embraces resistance, Zushio begins to identify with Sansho and becomes the tyrant’s surrogate son. Then he has a conversion, in a scene of surpassing beauty and emotion.
Does the story have a happy ending? No. But it has resolution, reconciliation, forgiveness ( although not of Sansho). At some point during the watching, “Sansho the Bailiff ” stops being a fable or a narrative and starts being a lament, and by that time it is happening to us as few films do.
Anthony Lane, the film critic for The New Yorker, did a profile of Mizoguchi a few years ago in which he wrote these extraordinary words: “I have seen ‘ Sansho’ only once, a decade ago, emerging from the cinema a broken man but calm in my conviction that I had never seen anything better; I have not dared watch it again, reluctant to ruin the spell, but also because the human heart was not designed to weather such an ordeal.”