Yashagaike

Myth and superstition hold center stage in Masahiro Shinoda's fantastic tale of a haunted mountain lake in the remote Japanese hinterland, home of the beautiful Dragon Queen and her myriad spirit consorts. While investigating an obscure reference on a pre-war map of the region, a traveling schoolteacher happens upon a nearby village where the inhabitants suffer a terrible drought rather than disturb the underwater demon, whose release is checked by the ritual sounding of a sacred bell. The film moves from magic realism to theatrical stylization and back again as the boundary between the natural and the supernatural slowly narrows and disappears, until the ignorant and bitter villagers finally unleash an apocalypse which has to be seen to be believed. It's an accomplished and often extraordinary blend of mystery, legend, humor and horror, featuring an appropriately odd (but now sadly dated) Moog synthesizer soundtrack by Isao Tomita.

For sheer unbridled culture shock there is nothing like Japanese cinema. I have one friend who gave me a series of films about a team of crack Japanese school girls who battle crime with a variety of lethal yo-yos. Another friend dragged me kicking and screaming to the Somerville Theater (back during its brief incarnation as an Art-House) to see Demon Pond, based on a popular play by B. K. Izumi and directed by Masahiro Shinoda. It's the story of a university student who travels to a small town in search of his professor, who left the university without word some years before. The professor is found living with his wife in a small house by a pond outside the village. He had promised a dying man that he would ring a large bell twice a day to prevent the demons from escaping from the pond and destroying the nearby village. The professor doesn't really believe in the demons, or the bell, but the problem with cynicism is that you can never rely upon it in a crunch (cause a true cynic can't really believe in cynicism either), so twice a day he's been ringing the bell, just in case. The townspeople don't believe in demons either, and there is grumbling that all this bell ringing is somehow the cause of the drought which has been plaguing the town for over a year. In the middle of all this controversy appears a pair of crustaceans with their own argument which carries over into the pond, where you meet the court of the Dragon Princess, who is trying to escape the pond to be with her boyfriend who's trapped in another pond. The Dragon Princess and the Professor's wife are played by a man, Tamasaburo Bando (one of Japan's most famous Kabuki players) and many of the scenes are staged in the Kabuki tradition, especially the scene in the pond (which resembles a Kabuki version of Pee-Wee's Playhouse) and an extremely elaborate tea ceremony (which goes on so long I was left thinking that the tea couldn't possibly still be hot.) Eventually the villagers take action, convince the professor to stop ringing the bell by threatening to tie his wife to a cow and send it careening into the pond. Cynicism loses in a spectacular demonstration of the consequences of messing with pond demons. I actually ended up going to see this film a second time, dragging some of my other friends kicking and screaming to the Somerville Theater. After all, the most fun you can have with foreign film is inflicting them on others.

"Demon Pond" is an wonderfully and stylishy presented allegorical fantasy. Its sudden (conscious) transition to artifice will catch you off guard, and may ruin things for those who are accustomed to more realistic narrative. But those willing to drift into a world of crab-humans, "mud people," and other admittedly Roger Corman-esquire creatures will enjoy this film's lush images. When critics refer to Ang Lee's gravity-defying romance/fantasy "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" as "the reason we go to the movies," they could very well use "Demon Pond" as another example. Despite its theatrical nature at times, it's full of otherworldly sensual pleasure that you could only get from a film. The mise-en-scene is exquisite, the eerie soundtrack unlike anything you've heard in a movie. The special effects at the end are breathtaking if you've escaped from your seat and managed to float into the world of the film...and don't let the occasionally silly subtitling ruin this two-hour fantasy. On top of it all, there are metaphors and themes to be uncovered everywhere. See this one on 35mm if you can!

This film has shown in the United States as Demon Pond. One part ghost story (with echoes of the Japanese classic, Ugetsu), one part a distinctly Japanese version of a "weird tale", and one part drawn from Japanese fairie tales and children's stories, much of the action is a vehicle for Bando, perhaps the most accomplished actor/female impersonator in Japanese theater and kabuki in the last 30 years. It is virtually impossible to tell that he is a man, playing a female role. More theatrical than scary, the film is still sometimes creepy and very imaginative visually. For those who are interested in Bando, Daniel Schmid made a "documentary" about him, The Hidden Face, which is well worth seeing. In all, this is an excellent example of superior recent Japanese film that has more aspirations to entertain than to be art, but entails both.

It's never a good thing when a mob of villagers approach with torches, is it? I loved the setup to this which had a teacher arriving to a remote, eerie place without much dialogue - the spiky trees, suspension bridge, and curvy houses all set the scene. And in case the villagers at the funeral weren't odd enough, a woman whips her breast out and squirts some milk into his eye to help him with some dust that's bothering him. Then he learns of the legend that a bell must be run three times a day in order to keep the dragon god who resides in the demon pond at bay, lest the town be flooded and everyone perish. Nothing can go wrong with this requirement, can it?

The problem I had with the film was its lengthy, laborious middle section, one that seemed to crawl along at a snail's pace. That was despite the sudden and bizarre appearance of a crab-man and catfish-man, the latter of whom reminded me of the cowardly lion from The Wizard of Oz with his facial expressions. There just wasn't enough to this fable for it to be told over 124 minutes, and in the meanwhile, most of the aesthetics in the scenery I had liked early on had been replaced with sets that were less appealing to me. Kind of a struggle to get through, but a nice finish.