DVD ADDICT
THE BALLAD OF NARAYAMA (Japan, 1983, colour) directed by Shohei Imamura and starring Ken Ogata, Sumiko Sakamoto, Takejo Kri, Tonpei Hidari, and Seiji Kurasani. Anamorphic widescreen transfer (1.85:1), 130 min. In Japanese with optional English subtitles. Extras include trailers, programme notes, and an image gallery (Region 1, NTSC)
PLALAI FAIFA
During the 1960s and 1970s the Japanese director Shohei Imamura made a series of tough, disenchanted movies about human behaviour at its worst in modern urban settings. Vengeance is Mine, a psychological serial murderer movie that no viewer ever forgets, looks at its subject so deeply and unsparingly that it shakes even those capable of snoozing through, say, The Silence of the Lambs.
In the Ballad of Narayama, Imamura leaves the city for a rural setting, a small, mountain village in the north of Japan something over a century ago, but the intensity of approach is the same. He adapted the screenplay from The Songs of Oak Mountain, a long story by Shichiro Fukasawa, but what we see in his screen version is much harsher than the source material, at least as it comes across in Donald Keene's English translation.
The film opens with a helicopter pan shot that travels over miles of uninhabited, snow-covered mountains before discovering a small settlement of primitive-looking dwellings buried under several feet of snow. Although the time frame is the latter half of the 19th century, the lifestyle of the peasants who live there, and the tools and implements they use, are so simple and basic that the story could probably just as easily be taking place in the 16th century.
The local traditions, still in strict force, also seem to come from the remote past, and the ones that dominates the movie's plot seems particularly cruel. Children are routinely killed at birth to conserve food (this fact is driven home early in the film when a man who was munching on a worm he has pried out of a tree branch stops in his tracks as he spots the corpse of a discarded baby boy in his paddy), and an upper limit has been set to ageing. Once a person reaches the age of 70, his eldest son is obliged to carry him to the top of a sacred mountain called Narayama to be left to die. The greatest honour a parent can hope for is to be carried to the mountain by a strong son.
Orin (Sakamoto), a widow who heads a family that consists of her two sons, one a widower, the other unmarried, and two grandsons, is 69. She has the mental agility and strength of a much younger woman, however, and this failure to yield to the years is considered disgraceful by the community. She still has all of her teeth, which is so unusual that the local children call her a demon, and she is so efficient at running the household that, unless there are changes, it will not survive without her.
Her children are her chief worries. Her younger son, called "the Stinker" (Hidari), wants to marry but has breath so foul that no woman will come near him. Worse, his older brother, although intelligent and physically strong, is emotionally eroded by guilt concerning his murder of his father years earlier.
Orin knows that before she can surrender herself to her fate on top of Narayama she has to put her household in order. Both sons need wives, and the woman whom Tatsuhei chooses must be capable of taking over her role as matriarch. Only then will she be able to make the mental preparations for her own final journey.
Her strategies allow the movie to inhabit the entire village and introduce its inhabitants, who sometimes come close to seeming like a gallery of grotesques. Okane, a woman who has made a religious vow to have sex with every man in the village, and an elderly woman who has lost her sense of smell and is therefore recruited to help the Stinker lose his virginity (he has resorted in his desperation to molesting the village dogs), are little more than caricatures, but they add some welcome rough comedy into a film whose general mood is grim and fatalistic.
During this first part of movie, which is set in the village, Imamura underlines his point about his characters being at the mercy of their environment by inserting footage from time to time of animals being driven by Nature to mate, kill, and feed on each other just as the villagers are doing. The brutality of some episodes, like one in which an entire family who have been stealing and hoarding food are dragged from their home by the villagers during the night and buried alive in a pit, is matched with a scene of hungry rats killing and eating a snake.
But once Tatsuhei sets off silently - no talking is permitted - for the peak of Narayama with his mother on his back, the tone of the movie changes radically. It enters the magic-permeated world of folk beliefs, and has a dreamy, surreal feeling to it. It is almost a separate movie in itself.
Earlier on Imamura offered a few glimpses of this aspect of the villagers' relation to the supernatural in the form of a spirit-inhabited tree associated with Tatsuhei's crime (it looks like a cousin to the magical tree Apichatpong evokes in Tropical Malady). But up on the mountain, the entire landscape belongs to another world. The scenes at the top, with Orin deep in prayer on a rocky ledge littered with the bones of those that have gone before her is both beautiful and terrifying, and her final encounter with Tatsuhei, who can't bear to abandon her, is unforgettably moving.
No one will mistake AnimEigo's transfer for a Criterion job, but it's good enough. The company has done an especially fine job with the subtitles, though, offering either standard subtitles or special ones where Japanese terms and traditions are explained at the top of the screen in white, with the dialogue translated on the bottom in yellow.
I purchased my copy online from amazon.com.
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