Sansho dayu (1954) - film review

In 11th Century Japan, an aristocratic woman, Tamaki, and her two young children, Zushio and Anju, leave their home to look for their father. The latter has been living in exile for several years, after disgracing himself as Governor by defending the rights of the peasants.  The family have not travelled far before they are captured by unscrupulous slave traders.  Tamaki is sent to Sado island to work as a prostitute whilst her children are sold into slavery on a private estate managed by the cruel bailiff Sansho.  Ten years pass.  Whilst Anju remains true to her father’s humanist teachings, Zushio has become stonehearted and cynical, all too willing to inflict punishment on his fellow slaves at Sansho’s bidding.   One day, Zushio and his sister are ordered to remove an infirm woman slave from the estate and dump her in the wilderness.  Anju realises this is the chance she has long waited for and persuades her brother to run away and look for his father.  To avoid being captured and forced to reveal her brother’s whereabouts, Anju drowns herself.   Zushio heads for Kyoto, where he finally succeeds in seeing the Chief Advisor.  To honour the memory of his recently deceased father, Zuzhio is appointed the new Governor of Tango.  His first act is to outlaw slavery throughout the province.  Returning to Sansho’s estate, Zuzhio is heartbroken when he learns of his sister’s death.  His one thought now is to be reunited with his mother, if she is still alive...

Sansho Dayu (a.k.a. Sansho the Bailiff) is unequivocally one of the all-time greats of world cinema.  The universality of its central themes - family cohesion, suffering, grief and compassion - make it accessible to any audience, of any time, of any place.  The sheer eloquence of its images and the searing humanity of the story it tells make this an unforgettable and profoundly moving film.  Here is a sublime work of art that bears testament to the resilience of the human spirit and the redeeming power of love.  It is hard to believe that there could ever be a more compassionate and poignant film than this.  

This is the film that cemented Kenji Mizoguchi’s international reputation as a world class filmmaker.  It completed his hat trick of Silver Lions at the Venice Film Festival, following awards for The Life of Oharu and Ugetsu, his two previous acclaimed masterpieces. The film is based on the 1915 short story by the well-known author Mori Ogai, which was itself derived from an ancient Japanese folk story.  Mizoguchi’s loyal screenwriter Yoshikata Yoda reworked the original story somewhat (apparently because the director loathed working with child actors) and introduced elements of Greek tragedy.

Although period dramas of this kind were becoming increasingly unpopular in Japan after WWII (since they represented a feudalistic past that most Japanese were happy to forget), Mizoguchi insisted on making them.  His bosses at Daiei Studios effectively gave him carte blanche to do so when these films found a large international audience in the wake of the West’s ’discovery’ of Japanese cinema in the early 1950s.  Unlike Kurosawa, who had only been directing films for just over a decade, Mizoguchi was a seasoned veteran who was in the final phase of a remarkable filmmaking career.  Mizoguchi’s last flourish of brilliance may have been partly fuelled by competitive spirit, an attempt to show the world that he was at least Kurosawa’s equal, if not his superior.

Certainly, in his last five years Mizoguchi did some of his best work, consistently turning out films that were critically acclaimed in their day and now regarded as flawless masterworks of world cinema.  Of these, Sansho dayu is arguably the most perfectly crafted and emotionally engaging of all Mizoguchi’s films.   The unhurried pace of this film and its masterful use of the long take and long-shot give it a mesmeric quality and a harrowing sense of reality.  The emotions that we experience whilst watching Sansho dayu are real and deeply felt, not the immediate and shallow response we customarily feel whilst watching a film.  Consequently, when we finally arrive at the film’s beautifully constructed but devastating conclusion, our hearts are fit to burst, through the combination of strange and powerful emotions that Mizoguchi has awoken.  If there was ever a film which everyone on Earth should see, this is surely it.

© James Travers 2010

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