IMDB Link
IMDB Rating: 8,3
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
Main Cast: Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa, Eitaro Shindo
"On its French release in 1960, Sansho the Bailiff was ranked by Cahiers du cinéma as the best film of the year, topping such classics as Breathless, L'avventura, and Psycho. Critics were struck by the film's gorgeous photography, elegant camerawork, and exotic settings and by Kenji Mizoguchi's signature use of imagery that quietly evokes a spiritual transcendence above the suffering of the material world. Unlike Akira Kurosawa's frequent use of close-ups and fast-paced editing, Mizoguchi, here as elsewhere, keeps his camera distant and his takes long, resulting in a contemplative style in which the characters' suffering and pain seem vivid, yet small compared with the immutability of the landscape. The result is a film that is thoroughly engaging up to its devastating finale. Though it was initially more popular in the West than in Japan, this masterpiece has since been widely recognized as one of Mizoguchi's most beautiful works.
The subjugated plight of women in Japanese society was always a subject close to Mizoguchi's heart--never more so than in Sansho Dayu, one of the towering late masterpieces of his final years. Its intensity, compassion, dramatic sweep and breathtaking formal beauty place it among his greatest films. The story is set in the harsh feudal world of 11th-century Japan. A provincial governor is demoted and exiled for showing too much clemency to those he rules; travelling to join him, his wife is kidnapped and forced to become a courtesan and her children are sold into slavery. They grow up under the harsh regime of the bailiff Sansho while their mother (the great actress Kinuyo Tanaka, in a performance of heartbreaking desolation) yearns hopelessly for them. Working with his favourite cameraman, Kazuo Miyagawa, Mizoguchi films this tragic story in long, intricate takes, rarely resorting to close-ups. The visual elegance and formal restraint of his style make the film all the more emotionally harrowing, and the final scene, on a desolate and windswept island, must be one of the most unbearably moving endings in all cinema."
No comments:
Post a Comment