L'Étang du démon

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.

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.

Melancholy is the key word in this perhaps most beautiful yokai movie. The yokai (incarnated spirits of nature) may play second fiddle to a more down-to-earth plot about friendship versus love, but the fantastic atmosphere is there from the start. Handsomely shot outdoors, the valley (and of course, the eponymous pond) remain the main centre of interest, if only visual, as well as its ultimate fate. Plus music by Isao Tomita. Lovely movie. Give it a spin.

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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.

Others here have described the film more than adequately, all I have to add is that of Feb 2021, Shochiku have announced that it will be digitally remastered and re-issued. I hope I get a chance to rework the subtitles!

Back in those days, when videotape wasn't readily available, we sat in a screening room, watched the film, made notes and received an audio tape of the dialogue to work on back at home - using audio cassette player, the original (often uncorrected) Japanese script and a typewriter. As you can imagine, it was difficult, if not impossible to remember all the actions and nuances that must be addressed to make the subtitles work seamlessly, especially since Japanese can be very vague at times, often leaving out the subject, or the object of a sentence, so he/she, or here/there, that/this must often be guessed at. It was always a painful experience to watch the complete subtitled film, surrounded by the producers and usually the director, continually wincing at what must have looked like simple translation errors.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the remastered masterpiece by often underrated genius of Japanese cinema, Shinoda Masahiro.