Right off the bat I've gotta confess that I missed the SpaceX launch. I saw a notice about it yesterday morning, but today - after focusing first on church and choir and then on the Rams and Dodger games - it just slipped my mind. I came home this eve to watch another movie on my break, and I missed out on the spectacular show in the sky. Seeing the amazing footage on the news left me pretty disappointed, but then I thought "well, I still got to see it on TV", and more importantly there will be other launches from Vandenberg, and I did get to see that other really weird one about a year ago that they didn't announce. It made a big blue vector in the sky and everybody wondered what the heck it was.
So that's my SpaceX bummer/rationalization, but I promise I will see the next one.
Meanwhile, I did watch a movie, and a masterpiece at that, so all was not lost. I screened another installment in our Mizoguchi Retrospective at The Tiny Apartment : "Sansho The Baliff" (1954). I had seen this film once before, probably around 2007, and I knew it was profound, but had forgotten why. After my second viewing I will never again forget.
The film takes place once again in feudal Japan. A local governor has angered his superiors by undercutting the orders of a military general to impose a rice tax on the impoverished workers of his province. The governor is then exiled, far away from his wife and children, a young son and daughter. They must now go it alone, and so the mother seeks to maintain some kind of stable existence for the three of them. They stay with an in-law for a few years (described in expository dialogue), but when we first see them they are on the road, homeless. They walk through a forest, looking for a place to camp for the night. As they are gathering branches and fronds to make a shelter, an old woman approaches. She says she is a priestess, and offers to take them in at her church if they will keep it a secret. Taking in the homeless is a crime, because bandits often pose themselves in this way, and when they are taken into charity they attack and kill the homeowner. So says the priestess, and the travelers, grateful for a place to stay, agree to keep her assistance a secret.
She takes the mother and her two children to a waiting boat. Her church is on another island, she says (Japan being an island nation). Two boatmen await, but once the mother is aboard, her two children are absconded with by men who appear from the bushes. She herself is rowed away, out to sea. The whole thing has been a trick by the phony "priestess". The woman's children are going to be sold into slavery and she will be forced into prostitution. Such was feudal Japan.
At the beginning of the movie, before their father is sent off into exile, he takes his son and daughter aside and gives them his credo, his words to live by which he makes them promise to adhere to. He tells them that the world is a cruel place, but "no matter how hard you are on yourself, always show mercy to others. A person is not human without mercy". The children promise to live by this principle.
What follows, after the treachery by the fake "priestess", is harrowing, a story of man's inhumanity to man. The mother disappears, rumored to be living in a brothel on another island. The children are ultimately sold to a wealthy plantation owner known as "Sansho The Baliff". He has some clout with the head of the district, and doesn't care that the two children are the son and daughter of the former governor. Now they are merely displaced slaves in his estimation. He sets them to work immediately on their arrival, and their lives grow worse from that point on.
I will not reveal any more of the story because there is a plot that kicks in. It is taken from a Japanese fable, and like all fables it is a moral tale. Keep in mind the father's final words to his children and you will have an idea of where the story is headed.
If you are going to watch "Sansho The Baliff", you will need to be prepared for a very sad and cruel depiction of the way humans are capable of treating one another. Mizoguchi made misery his milieu, but because he felt it, and not out of any dramatic concern. He knew the history of Japan, which wasn't opened to the West in modern times until Admiral Perry's visit in 1853. The feudal system there was particularly horrible. Women and children were chattel.
Mizoguchi shows the strength of these downtrodden souls, however, and that is the power of this tremendous movie, their determination to overcome an insurmountable situation.
The black and white photography in "Sansho The Baliff" is painterly and as good as can be had. The pacing of the film is slow, and so two hours feels longer, but if you can sit and pay attention, it will gradually envelop you.
While it could be said that "Sansho The Baliff" is depressing, with a dour outlook on the nature of mankind, the opposite could also be said. Watch to the end to see what I mean.
What is certain is that it is one of the greatest films ever made, and could be considered for anyone's Top Ten List as far as I am concerned.
Two Thumbs Up at the highest level. A film that must be seen, when you are ready. ////
Rams win! Dodgers lose (oy). Yeah, sports.....I know. Sports are temporary, but somehow semi-important. No, wait a minute......who put that "semi" in there?
See you in the morning. The singing was good in church today, in case you were wondering.
xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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