La ballade de Narayama

The Ballad of Narayama (1958) Rating: (4/5) Review: "The Ballad of Narayama" masterfully blends Kabuki theater with the golden age of Japanese cinema, delivering a powerful and moving experience. The film's fantastic sets and heartrending climax make it truly memorable.

At the heart of the story is Orin, an elderly woman who faces the traditional practice of being carried to Mount Narayama to die once she reaches the age of 70. Her character is portrayed with deep emotional resonance, capturing the strength and dignity with which she accepts her fate. Orin's son plays a crucial role in the narrative, as he struggles with the impending loss of his mother and the cultural expectations placed upon him. Their relationship adds a poignant layer to the film, highlighting themes of familial duty and love.

The performances are deeply emotional, and the direction is impeccable, capturing the cultural and historical essence of the story. This film is a testament to the enduring power of traditional Japanese storytelling.

This is the story of an old woman who according to customary tradition of the remote Japanese village where she lives, must be carried by his son to the top of the neighbouring Narayama mountain to meet the gods and die since she has reached 70 years of age. Behind this tradition who seems awful to our western minds, lies the fact that the community is too poor to be able to support its old people. But tradition doesn't always subjugate human feelings and if the old woman shows herself as resigned to her fate and even displays some joy in fulfilling the tradition rules, his son feels a deep sorrow in accomplishing that terrible duty and while doing it he must fight in his heart and mind to subdue those loving and compassionate feelings. The scene at the top of the mountain when he is carrying his mother and ends up by laying her on the ground where soon snow begins to fall is intensely tragic in its silence interrupted now and then by the outbursts of the powerless and extremely emotional son's revolt. All along the film we hear to the voice off of a commentator who narrates the story accompanied by a beautiful traditional Japanese music. This commentator's performance reminds us of the role of the chorus present in ancient Greek tragedies. The images make us think of the traditional Japanese paintings with their patches of neat colours making a somewhat theatrical scenery. This movie gives way to deep emotions although not exposed with our kind of western reactions but with Japanese type ones which doesn't make them appear less human.

The Ballad Of Narayama (aka: Narayam bushiko) is a film by Keisuke Kinoshita, whose directing career stretched over 40 years. In notable fashion it mixes kabuki style balladeer narration and musical accompaniment with a tragic story set around responsibilities of old age, rural hardship, family cruelty and the painful obligations brought by restrictive and conservative social convention. It's a consideration of that which is a characteristic of many films made before, and during, the golden age of Japanese cinema. In the hands of masters like Mizoguchi, for instance, such depictions frequently evolved into profound considerations of the female condition. (In fact star Kinuyo Tanaka, was a favourite of that master, having previously appeared in films like Sansho Dayu and Ugetsu Monogatari.) Narayama is of that old school: an often painful - this viewer for one will long remember the moment when the old woman knocks out her own teeth on the edge of a stone grinder - and frequently moving account of a society which denies dignity to the old but which, at least in one instance, is granted them anyway. Such a traditional style of storytelling all but vanished when a new wave of Japanese directors come to prominence in the following decade. As others have observed the biggest irony of the film is that grandmother Orin is probably the single most productive member of her immediate circle. Of her nearest relatives, as she herself says: "Tatsuhei and Kesakichi are useless" - seen thus, her looming absence is very much a tragedy on both a social, as well as a personal, level.

Much of Narayama's power is drawn from its exquisite staging, an entirely successful recreation of a village environment and surrounding countryside done entirely in the studio. Except for the striking final shots, every part of the film is artificial, including the passing of time, even if emotions evoked thereby are not. Intense character interactions are sometimes emphasised in pools of light, while at another moment the set is lit in an ominous red; painted backcloths occasionally drop to provide transition between one scene and another, while actors end their parts in silhouette as the next action starts up behind them. Close ups are used sparingly, characters typically seen at a distance in their environment, again as on a stage. It is a process unique to this version of the tale, based on the folk story Dumping Grannies. It was one that, incidentally, was not copied over by Imamura in his, also critically successful, 1983 remake of Narayama with the result that that film arguably had a wider international appeal (it won top prize at Cannes).

In a different tradition entirely, the artificiality and expressionism on display in the present version recall that of Kwaidan (1964) a colour horror film where even the sun and sky are painted in dramatic fashion - even though not with quite the intensity. The result of Narayama's very deliberate technique is to emphasise the narrative texture of events as well at the same time to place them firmly within a particularly nationalistic tradition of story telling. It's also a cumulative effect given abrupt contrast by the last scene of the film, which places events back in a modern context.

In the film, moments of pathos and tragedy frequently counterbalance those of formality and ritual, and it's the tension between these two that gives the results power, and their Japanese flavour. This is most notable during the final trip to the mountain, one made by the despairing son carrying his grandmother upwards on his back. It's a long journey both for the principals as well as in actual screen time, as the passage occupies long and frequently silent minutes as they pass deliberately through the artificially crafted landscape. It's one that has been previously described, and its responsibilities circumscribed, by the precise instructions of village elders. But it speaks volumes too as far as the central relationship is concerned; heartbreaking as the mother refuses to communicate during her final hours, and as we see Tatsuhei torn between duty and natural familial feeling.

As one might expect the performances in Narayama are uniformly excellent, although that of Tanaka ought to be singled out for especial praise. Her portrayal of Orin conveys sadness, warmth and self-sacrifice in equal, convincing measure. With her entirely honourable acceptance of her destiny, and blind faith in the reasoning behind it, she is as much a reflection of her society as she is criticism of it. Termed by her contemporaries the "33 devil teeth woman" for her unhelpfully intact dental work (a sign of her continuing, unwelcome food consumption), Orin never the less retains a defining put-upon dignity which remains intact for the duration of the film, even when she says nothing but droops sadly, carried to her fate on her son's back.

A world away from the MTV editing techniques and CGI laden work of contemporary Hollywood product, some will find the essentially static nature of this film a challenge, and indeed for a introduction to classic Japanese cinema viewers would be better directed to the contemporary work of Kurosawa. Others will be pleased that such a relatively hard to see classic is at last available after some time out of circulation. The Ballad Of Narayama is a film whose formal beauty and human qualities impress even today.

In Kabuki style, the film tells the story of a remote mountain village where the scarcity of food leads to a voluntary but socially-enforced policy in which relatives carry 70-year-old family members up Narayama mountain to die.

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film a maximum 4 stars, and added it to his Great Movies list in 2013, making it the final film he added to the list before his death. In a June 1961 review in The New York Times, A.H. Weiler called the film "an odd and colorful evocation of Japan's past that is only occasionally striking"; "It is stylized and occasionally graphic fare in the manner of the Kabuki Theatre, which is realistically staged, but decidedly strange to Western tastes." I have to respectfully disagree with Weiler. Perhaps at the time the film was strange to Western taste. I couldn't speak to that. But I find it quite refreshing, and really enjoy how they made it obvious that the story was told on a stage. Rather than hide the stag as American films do, this one embraces it, so you know you are really watching a story and it need not be any more than that. And yet, it is not just theater but a bigger experience.

Made available on Blu-ray by the Criterion Collection, Kinoshita's highly stylized exploration of the Narayama story is a deliciously stunning exploration of the possibilities of colour, and has some of the most inventive use of transition in film.

You might be familiar with the far more explicit and naturalistic film version of the same story from 1983, made by Shôhei Imamura, and knowledge of that film greatly enhanced my viewing of this. These two films are worlds apart, in fact so much that it feels that Imamura's film openly converses with this, since its theatricality seems to almost provoke the kind of hyper-naturalism inherent in the Imamura. Another film that enriches this is Kinugasa's "Jigokumon" ("Gates of Hell", 1953), available on Region B Blu-ray courtesy of the Masters of Cinema, and soon to be released by Criterion, as well.

I didn't know much of Kinoshita before this, only the biographical information concerning his relationship with Masaki Kobayashi, who served as his apprentice and whose film "Harakiri" (1962) Kinoshita openly disliked (he reversed his opinion later). I think it's somewhat ironic since Kobayashi's use of lighting certainly finds a compeer here, and I think this definitely encouraged "Kwaidan" (1964) to go to the lengths it did.