Film Review
The almost accidental appearance of Akira Kurosawa's
Rashomon at the 1951 Venice Film
Festival created in the West an instant appreciation for Japanese cinema.
Japan's Golden Age of filmmaking was well under way by the time westerners
first succumbed to the exotic beauty of
Rashomon and Kenji Mizoguchi's
Ugetsu monogatari (1953),
and it is a curious thing that many great films made in Japan around this
time achieved little or no impact at home but became enormous critical successes
in the West. This is true of Teinosuke Kinugasa's
Gate of Hell
(a.k.a.
Jigokumon) a sumptuously filmed
jidai-geki (period
drama) which has the distinction of being the first colour Japanese film
to be seen in the West.
Teinosuke Kinugasa may not have acquired the lasting fame of other important
Japanese film directors - the names Kurosawa, Mizoguchi and Ozu trip far
more readily off the tongue - but he had a prolific filmmaking career and
in his lifetime was one of the most revered directors in his country.
Gate of Hell is his best-known film but it is far from being his best
film, and compared with the two silent films which brought him early acclaim
-
A Page of Madness (1926) and
Crossroads (1928) - it appears
directorially bland, the mise-en-scène lacking in both flair and imagination.
Kinugasa was himself unhappy with the film as the script (adapted from a
play by Kan Kikuchi) was written in too great a hurry and he was forced to
pad the story out so that it achieved the ninety minute runtime which the
studio (Daiei) had imposed on him. The film's sluggish pace and lack
of narrative content are painfully noticeable in its second half, although
it makes up for this in other ways, not least of which its stunning production
design.
Gate of Hell is one of the most visually spectacular of all Japanese
films, indeed its bold use of colour (the palette is dominated by iridescent
primary colours) makes it one of the most vibrant and eye-catching pieces
of cinema you will ever see. You are not eased into the film, you are
thrown in, with heart-stopping brutality. The film begins in a frenzy
of activity, cutting manically from one action-filled shot to another in
a way that vividly conveys the confusion and terror of a country falling
apart in the turmoil of a bloody revolution. The pace is so fast that
you can hardly keep up - it is just a blaze of activity, as fast and exciting
as any of Kurosawa's later samurai films. Then, twenty minutes into
the film, the tempo suddenly changes as the main part of the film gets underway
- a classic love triangle situation in which a samurai hero is gradually
torn to pieces by his insane craving for a woman he can never possess.
The abrupt change of pace is so jarring that many cite this as a weakness
of the film. In fact, it was probably intentional, marking a clear
dividing line between two very different worlds - one a war-ravaged vision
of hell where violence is external and fiercely blatant, the other a kind
of earthly paradise where violence is contained, locked away inside the individual.
In the first world, the samurai Morito is in his element, events allowing
him to channel his aggression into extraordinary acts of courage and heroism.
In the second, he is very much a fish out of water and he is ill-equipped
for the fight that ultimately destroys him, the battle against those inner
forces - lust, vanity, jealousy - that are guiding his destiny.
Gate
of Hell is a classical diptych in which the first and second parts of
the story mirror one another with a clever but cruel irony.
Playing the male lead is Kazuo Hasegawa, a highly charismatic actor who appeared
in many of Kinugasa's films and had an incredibly busy career in Japan for
several decades. Unlike the samurai in Kurosawa's films, Hasegawa's
Morito is a deeply flawed, almost clownish character, reminiscent of so many
of Sheakespeare's tragic characters. Stubborn, violent and wickedly
calculating, he is hard to engage with and our sympathies are almost entirely
monopolised by the unfortunate object of his compulsive desire, the Lady
Kesa, handsomely played by Machiko Kyo, the lead actress in
Rashomon
and Japan's most famous actress at the time.
The most proactive and heroic of the film's protagonists, Kesa is something
of a proto-feminist, a woman whose outward vulnerability belies her inner
strength. It is her moral superiority and resolution that allow her to
resist the tyranny of male domination, so she is free to choose her own destiny,
albeit a tragic one, to save her honour and protect the one she truly loves.
Gate of Hell may be set in a far distant period of Japanese history
but it has a very modern resonance, and in common with many of Mizoguchi's
films, it portrays women as the nobler, wiser sex whilst lending some pretty
overt support to the emancipation of women. The other male protagonist,
Wataru Watanabe (played by Isao Yamagata) is another atypical kind of hero,
one who resists the lure of an easy vengeance and shows an almost unreasonable
degree of compassion to the one who robs him of his most precious thing.
Watanabe's insistence that a wrong-doer should be permitted to live
out his penitence instead of being given the easy option of a swift exit
makes another valuable social lesson for a 1950s audience.
Gate of Hell was extraordinarily well-received when it was first seen
in Europe and America, not long after its comparatively muted release in
Japan in 1953. The film was not only honoured with the top prize at
the Cannes Film Festival in 1954 (the precursor to the Palme d'Or), it also
received two Oscars, in the categories of Best Foreign Language Film and
Best Costume Design, Color. Today, the lethargic pace of the film's
second half and its theatrical style of acting (closer to
kabuki theatre
than modern cinema) date it somewhat. It doesn't quite match up to
the sophistication, depth and sustained artistic brilliance of contemporary
films by Mizoguchi, Ozu and Kurosawa, and yet it is hard not to be seduced
by its chief asset, the lush colour photography which seems to somersault
from the screen as a mesmerising succession of exquisitely painted tableaux.
Seldom has the innate visual power of cinema been exploited as fully and
as elegantly as
Gate of Hell. The film may fall short in several
respects, but it has a savage beauty that grabs you every time you watch
it, filling your head with images so stark and tangible that it seems they
will persist for an eternity. Art does not have to be subtle to make
itself felt.
© James Travers 2016
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