Kôchiyama Sôshun

The story of Kochiyama about two petty conmen outwitting a rigid ruling class was usually presented on the kabuki stage as two separate plays, Kochiyama and Naozamurai. For the purposes of the film, Sadao Yamanaka selects the first of these bandit plays, retains the basic structure, downgrades characters from their more high-minded kabuki versions and mercilessly parodies left and right.

The result is a film where a samurai retainer loses his token sword - a small knife, itself an opportunity for belittling a symbol - which through a long chain of bartering is eventually sold back to him but as a fake, such are the machinations of a society openly bent on status but secretly powered by deceit; where the poetic gesture of a double suicide is shockingly confounded when one of the two lovers crawls out of the water alive; where the two rascals who spend the film drinking, conning, and blustering, get to be the unlikely heroes who must do the right thing.

So a text rich in irony is reworked in such a way that those original ironies are turned on their heads as well. Where the original heroes showed confidence, here they are unnerved, and their antagonists from the samurai class are rendered pompous but basically harmless buffoons.

Most of the film takes place in the narrow roads of Edo's shantytown, inside a tavern, or the low-class gambling den on the floor above. It is in line with the colorful world Yamanaka presented in the Million Pot Ryo, seamy life on the streets a little out of glory's way.

The only downside, a significant one to my mind; it is incessantly talky and perhaps difficult to follow without some prior knowledge, and features none of the discerning eye for a transitory world Yamanaka exhibited in his earlier film. It is not as fresh or joyously cinematic. It does not imagine visually first, or in ways that really move. The dharma dolls from that film we can also see here lined up in a shelf, but the karmic wheel is not spun. It's purely from a theatric tradition what unfolds, a complex series of ironic resolutions well told.

To see the other, visual side of Japan cultivated for the screen, you will have to follow a different thread.

Among the many sure treasures of Japanese cinema we have lost are certainly the 23 films made by Yamanaka Sadao. Indeed, only three survive in full. All of these have been collected on DVD by the Masters of Cinema Series.

But just as is the case with Jean Vigo, great genius doesn't need an extensive filmography to present itself. The films that survive are not great because of hype, historicism or obscurity, but because they are gorgeous achievements in humane and engrossing storytelling and utter expertise in filmic terms. Yamanaka might never be considered in equal terms with Kurosawa by the mainstream, but he is just as inventive, radical and entertaining.

These films are desert island stuff for me, and as is often the case with Yamanaka, nothing is as it seems: a stolen knife (apparently) isn't stolen, it's a fake to begin with and is not; people we come to know by name have different names altogether. Pretense, roles. Whereas **Tange Sazen** (1935) of the previous year is a humorous film, the tragically humane and existential undersong of Yamanaka's films pervades even the light moments. "Kôchiyama Sôshun" (1936), translated into English as "Priest of Darkness", most certainly leans closer toward "Ninjô kami fûsen" (1937), yet perhaps with a rougher edge of melodrama.

All three existing Yamanakas revolve around a lost "object"; here we have the knife, sure, but also Hara Setsuko's Onami, who is reduced to an object of desire with a price tag by the clan from whom our title character, played by Yamanaka "regular" Kawarasaki Chôjûrô, helps to hide her. How much is a life worth, the film asks, and what does it really mean to live?

Yamanaka wrote in his last will: "If 'Humanity and Paper Balloons' should prove to be the last film by Sadao Yamanaka, I would feel a little aggrieved. It is not a loser's grief." The war would take him in Manchuria five months later. Not a loser's grief, but of one who knows that whatever films he would have made would have been beautiful.

It looks like an amiable comedy set in Tokyo's Yoshiwara district, where saki shop owner Setsuko Hara is worried about her brother, a wastrel who stole a samurai's knife when he put it down for a minute. There are amiable drunks, rakish monks, quarrels about nothing that are settled instantly when a woman has a cut finger, and Daisuke Katô in his first screen appearance. People keep throwing around big sums of money, treating 10 ryos like they're nothing, but the sums keep rising and the tempers begin to fray as the endless night that makes up this movie wears on.

I'm probably missing a lot of subtext. It's based on a kabuki play by Mokuami Kawatake, whose works I am absolutely unfamiliar with. However the comedy elements keep it chugging along.

Based on a well-known Kabuki drama titled "Kochiyama to Naozamurai", which Yamanaka distills into a masterpiece of jidaigeki (period film) as shomingeki (everyman drama), blending the two into something he apparently had rights to entirely in Japan during the 30s. Through a series of intrigues, Kochiyama, Naojiro (who becomes Hirotaro for the film), Ichinijo, and Hirotaro's sister Onami (played by a young Hara Setsuko) all pretty much have the worst day or two of their lives. This thoroughly pessimistic film isn't much of a surprise considering 1937's Humanity and Paper Balloons (a paper balloon, by the way, being played with by a child provides one of the most memorable scenes in this film, or any film, about half way through) but Million Ryo Pot (1935) seems impossibly optimistic in comparison, you'd almost think they were made by different directors (except for the perfection of course.) McDonald (who I've been reading a lot of lately, not on purpose, it just seems my interests are lining up with hers) surmises that the last two films are a response to the rise of fascism (especially the ni-ni rokyu incident) in Japan, and I can't imagine a better reason.

If you have a chance to see this film, or any of Yamanaka's work, do so. They're enjoyable and stick in the back of your head forever. Unfortunately only three of his films survive, but I would rate them as some of my favorites. Ten stars and very highly recommended to everyone.

Steven