The Goblin Cat

It's a phenomenon that I suspect is more common among great films than those on any other level of the scale, but often when watching a movie I consider great I will notice a brief moment, maybe just a second long, that locks into place why the whole is so successful, or best illustrates the film's tone, or something else along those lines. If I may pull from the group of films I have watched or re-watched within the last couple of days, there's a bit in Hal Ashby's The Last Detail where Jack Nicholson's Buddusky is playing darts, and gambling with the per diem money provided by the US Navy for the five days it will, or should at most, take him and Otis Young's Mulhall to transport Randy Quaid's Meadows from the Naval base in Norfolk, VA to a military prison in Portsmouth, MA. Mulhall voices to Buddusky his concern that perhaps the man with whom Buddusky is playing darts for money might be hustling him, and Nicholson's expression, while difficult to describe, conveys amusement, arrogance, offense that Mulhall should so underestimage him, and a weariness that he should even have to field such concerns. If this hilarious moment doesn't sum up The Last Detail, it certainly sums up Buddusky, who, anyway, is key to the whole thing, after all.

A silent reaction to words spoken, not to her but about her, flits across the face of Oharu, played by Kinuyo Tanaka, late in Kenji Mizoguchi's The Life of Oharu, which Criterion is releasing on DVD and Blu-ray tomorrow. I keep wanting to call this film The Fall of Oharu, probably because of Mizoguchi's series of "fallen women" pictures, and also because Oharu's life is the story of her fall. At the point in the film when the moment I'm revving up to describe occurs, Oharu has gone from a young upper-class woman whose love affair with a young man (Toshiru Mifune) who is beneath her standing, to a middle-aged prostitute, carried along the sluice of late 17th century Japanese propriety, the jaw-dropping penalties when that propriety is breached, and, occasionally, old fashioned bad luck and tragedy. But mostly it's just being a woman in Japan at that time which does her in, and Mizoguchi is elegantly ruthless about it all. Oharu can do nothing to extract herself. She fell in love outside of her class, so she and her family are banished. Her family's good name is ruined, so to earn money she must become a prostitute. She must become a rich man's concubine when his wife becomes barren, which might save her family, but her past ruins even that, at least somewhat remunerative, indignity. And so on, without ease.

Eventually, without options and into her middle years, Oharu falls back into prostitution. One night she is taken by a man she assumes is to be her client for the evening into building, perhaps his home, where they talk for a bit, before it's revealed that the room she finds herself in is full of men, and the man is not a client, but a Buddhist pilgrim who has chosen Oharu to display to his fellow pilgrims as an incentive to not stray from their vows of purity. Telling the other men to look at Oharu, the man asks them if they still want to sleep with women. Mizoguch has placed his camera so that Oharu, embarrassed, is turned away from the men, but to the camera. The men line the wall to our left. Oharu faces the pilgrims only once, when asked to, and after that faces us. The first man goes on speaking about her as though she was deaf, and at one point -- and this is the moment in question -- describes her as a "goblin cat." At these words, Oharu lifts her head up and turns it slightly, and an expression of not just hurt but intense weariness crosses over her face. As if everything else wasn't bad enough, now I have to listen to this? And somehow not react to it? I must stay here, kneeling, and let them talk about me like this? The inhumanity of the moment is enormous, and, strangely, made worse still by the fact that it is entirely without malice. "Cruelty" is not quite the word, as this implies a deliberateness. But the pilgrims are merely upholding propriety. Oharu is merely an object lesson on the pitfalls of doing otherwise. That's all in her face.

Also fascinating about this shot is the distance Mizoguchi's camera is from Kinuyo Tanaka. Now you must forgive me here, and The Life of Oharu is not even my first Mizoguchi film; it's my fourth, if you simply must keep score. To be specific, prior to this I'd seen Ugetsu, Sansho the Bailiff, and, something of a left-field relative obscurity here, his four-hour The 47 Ronin. But that was all some time ago, and it wasn't until I watched The Life of Oharu that I noticed his positive phobia of close-ups. I've since gathered that this is actually part of Mizoguchi's whole deal, or was for a while anyway, but it was gratifying to be struck by it cold. But enough about me. The Life of Oharu is, of course, rife with the absence of close-ups, but it rang a particular tone at the moment when Oharu reacts to be called a "goblin cat," because I can't imagine another director, from the great ones to the shit ones, who wouldn't have either cut to her face, or let his or her camera drift to the right, maybe push in a little, something to highlight her, even if only slightly. Her face, at this moment, is in a sense the entire film in a one-second shadow, however, should we prefer to do so, we could look at the pilgrims instead -- Buddusky in that scene from The Last Detail may not have been in a strict close-up, but his face is pretty much the only thing we have to look at. And it's not as though Mizoguchi frames this shot so that Oharu is the visual equal of the pilgrims, but the viewer does have options. As Mizoguchi films it, there is a world apart from Oharu. There is a world that is, in fact, doing this to her.

I'm tempted, or was tempted at one point while thinking all this over, to regard this aspect of Mizoguchi's style as generous, in that Oharu not only doesn't exist in a cultural vacuum, which is hard to miss, but the people around her have lives, too. After all, not everybody in this film apart from Oharu, is an appalling stooge of this society (although, Jesus, it's close) -- more than a couple of them are rather sweet, if helpless, or just as unlucky. But I don't think "generous" is the correct word. If you'll pardon me for this, I suspect a better word way to describe it is to say that it is simply honest. Why is Oharu in this position? Look around her. Given the placement of Mizoguchi's camera, you're free to. Then again, with that honesty comes a certain unavoidable generosity. Over the course of the film, more than once Oharu will return home in shame to her parents. Oharu's mother Tomo (Tsukie Matsuura) is hopelessly loving, but her father Shinzaemon (Ichiro Sugai) is close to hateful in these moments -- early on in the most extensive of these sequences, he actually shoves Oharu out of childish selfishness and frustration. But if the camera sticks close to anyone in this section, it's Shinzaemon. You may want to throttle the son of a bitch, but you also can't miss that his life has collapsed, too. So the equation regarding close-ups becomes clear: the fewer of them you have, the more of everything else you will see.

And once you've gotten your teeth into the concept that The Life of Oharu completely lacks one of the most basic shots in filmmaking, you can't quite let it go, and everything else in the film must be considered alongside it. Towards the end -- and I'll tread lightly here -- after the "goblin cat" scene, the film's climax occurs within a frankly magnificent tracking shot, during which Oharu's face must tell the story of her life even more starkly than in the shot described above, yet we see her much less clearly. (I would be remiss, by the way, if I didn't mention the score by Ichiro Saito, which is generally wonderful and here achieves an eerie brilliance.) The tracking shot is about ceremony, which the "goblin cat" was not, at least not officially. The tracking shot chronicles something official, though, and a futile attempt to make the ceremony recognize something other than itself. In a general way -- or maybe a very specific way, depends on your definition, I suppose -- Oharu is the victim of ceremony, and by putting her at this particular distance from the camera, it's rather striking how lightly she glances off what is proper in her society.

Please Enjoy

Tomorrow, on Tuesday February 5, Criterion will release to DVD and Blu-ray Keisuke Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama. When the title was first announced by Criterion a few months ago, I was briefly excited because I thought it was Shohei Imamura's 1983 remake, a film I had seen and enjoyed in college, and which I'd been wanting to see again ever since*. It took me probably less than a minute of intent observation to realize that no, this wasn't Imamura's film, but another, earlier take on the source material, a novel by Shichiro Fukazawa, from 1958. "Oh great, so there's no boobs in this one, is what you're saying," I think I probably thought. But I was intrigued anyway, because the core story (and boy I'd like to be able to read that Fukazawa novel) is a queasily fascinating one, as it deals with the ancient Japanese ritual of ubasute -- the abandoning by a family of their elderly in the wilderness, where they will certainly die, thereby somewhat easing the crush of poverty. For a little while anyway. My memory of the Imamura film isn't that sharp, but I remember it being somewhat wild and nasty and irreverent and weird, which is not to say callous, about the whole thing, this being Imamura, and I could only assume that was his deal -- whatever Keisuke Kinoshita was going to bring to the story, I surmised, it probably wouldn't be that.

And no indeed, it is not. All Kinoshita did with his The Ballad of Narayama is he made one of the most gorgeous, most heartbreaking, most singularly moving and stylistically bold and blind-sidingly wonderful films I have ever seen. My realization that the film I was watching was actually that good was accompanied by a mix of excitement (tempered with melancholy, if you prefer, given the subject matter, but come on, movies this good are exciting) and chagrin, the latter because prior to The Ballad of Narayama, I basically had no idea who Kinoshita was. I'd heard about Twenty-Four Eyes, but didn't know who made it, and probably more importantly I've never seen it. "We don't know what we don't know" is pretty goddamn on the money, I'd say. I don't necessarily regard my ignorance here as a bad thing -- it's not hard to view the whole situation in a positive light, because now I get to watch other Kinoshita movies for the first time. But it was shocking in any case. Criterion does this from time to time, actually; they'll entice you with the big-title releases, like, say, Carlos, and then smack you upside the head with The Phantom Carriage. We must be ever vigilant.

To some degree, the film is presented as a kabuki play, though from what very, very little I know about that form, it's not that exactly -- the actors don't wear any garish makeup, for example. But The Ballad of Narayama does pull from theater, with sets that shift, almost in full view, to make way for the next scene, and narration sung in the joruri style, which, I've learned, is typically used in Japanese puppet theater. Kinoshita also uses plainly artificial sets, painted-backdrop skies, and set illumination that sharpen down into spotlights, or blaze through a red gel when blood is spilled. The effect of all this, if I may simplify it egregiously, is not unlike what an American audience would be used to seeing from the self-consciously melodramatic style of, say, Douglas Sirk. I say this, however, while acknowledging that The Ballad of Narayama is purely Japanese, with no apparent interest in doing anything that would make any of this go down more easily in the West. Which is maybe why this particular film has, up until now, been so hard to see, I don't know, but there's something almost exhilarating about watching a film from a culture very much unlike the one I know, and realizing "This film doesn't care about me, or if I 'get' it, or if its very Japanese-ness will ring false, or weird, to me." To do anything else would be to make a completely different film. I make the Douglas Sirk comparison only to highlight that, like Sirk's films, the artificiality of The Ballad of Narayama is not intended to separate the audience from what's happening in the story, even if that turns out to be the result for some people, but to heighten the experience, and to convey emotion in a way that strict realism couldn't hope to.

That may sound counterintuitive, but oh well. That's the way it is, folks. All I know is, it's devestating to watch the film's central character, an old woman named Orin (Kinuyo Tanaka) who, as the film begins, is very close to the age when she will be expected to allow herself to be carried to, and abandoned to die in, Narayama, wander sweetly through this cruel circumstance, so bound by tradition that she claims to welcome her end, to the point that it falls on her to comfort her own son Tatsuhei (Teiji Takahashi, giving an agonizingly sad performance) who will have to actually carry her in a basket and leave her on the mountain, the theatrical, almost storybook presentation turns this awful, long-gone ritual into something immediate, as though whoever first thought of ubasute, or perhaps more to the point, whoever first told a story about ubasute, had the foresight to understand that however much the particulars might change centuries down the line, the basics never would, so we might as well hammer our metaphors into place now. Because make no mistake, the hopelessness of dealing with and caring for and torturing oneself over what to do with and about an aging parent is all over every inch of The Ballad of Narayama, never more so than in the film's most quietly sad moment, when Tatsuhei lies back on the floor as his family, including his mother, talk casually about what is in essence Orin's upcoming death, utterly unable to embrace tradition at the same time that it's trying to claw his heart to shreds.

There is so much more I could say about The Ballad of Narayama -- Orin's "33 demon teeth," the horror-film tinge of the sequence that "solves" that issue, or the relentless, creeping inescapability of Rokuzaemon Kineya's guitar score (as differentiated from Matsunosuke Nozawa's joruri accompaniment), or how this story -- and this element I do remember, to some degree, from Imamura's film -- starkly contrasts, to extremes, the various ways a family may regard their elder members, or, for that matter, the various ways the elder members, or you, may face their, or your, death. When the time comes, I mean. Orin's sweet acceptance may be a mask beaten into shape by tradition, in other words, and despairing as that possibility is, we're also shown a character who doesn't even have that, who has less than nothing, and so perhaps Kinoshita regards Orin as a figure to be envied, in a sense. Or also -- and this really is a dead end, as far as my purposes for today are concerned -- the idea of narration in films, and how film schools, or screenwriting classes and books and guides, try to drum into people's heads arbitrary rules of what to do or not do, even if what is being degraded is a time-honored narrative tool. Like I say, though, that's some whole other thing entirely. What's important, your one takeaway, is that Keisuki Kinoshita's The Ballad of Narayama is a masterpiece. See it.