Mizoguchi's masterpiece

Kenji Mizoguchi's "Sansho the Bailiff," one of the best of all Japanese films, is curiously named after its villain, and not after any of the characters we identify with. The bristle-bearded slavemaster Sansho is at the center of two journeys, one toward him, one away, although the early travelers have no suspicion of their destination. He is as heartless a creature as I have seen on the screen.

The film opens on a forest hillside, where Tamaki, the wife of a kind district administrator, is discovered with her young son, Zushio, her younger daughter, Anju, and their servant, making their way down a difficult path. The dense underbrush here is reflected throughout the film, which is set in 11th-century feudal times, and reflects the director's feeling that humans and nature are the sides of a coin. The little group has had to flee for their lives after her husband drew the wrath of the cruel Sansho and was exiled. They hope to rejoin him.

In this shot, and throughout the film, Mizoguchi closely observes the compositional rules of classic cinema. Movement to left suggests backward in time, to the right, forward. Diagonals move in the direction of their sharpest angle. Upward movement is hopeful, downward ominous. By moving from upper left to lower right, they are descending into an unpromising future.

They stop for the night, build a rough shelter from tree limbs, and start a small fire. In the darkness, wolves howl. Their little domestic circle in the firelight is a moment of happiness, however uncertain, that they will not feel again. Then an old priestess finds them, and offers them shelter in her nearby home. In the morning, discovering their destination, she suggests that a boat journey will greatly diminish the distance. She knows some friendly boatman. As they leave her house, a furtive dark figure, almost unseen, darts behind them in the shrubbery.

The delivery to the boatmen is a betrayal. The woman and servant are captured by body merchants, the women to be sold into prostitution, the children into slavery under Sansho. He runs a barbaric prison camp of forced labor, and it here that the children will spend the next 10 years. Sansho is an unlovely man, a bully and sadist, who is surrounded by servile lackeys, all except for his son.

Flashbacks have shown us something of the captured children's early life under their father, a good man who gave his son an amulet representing the Goddess of Mercy, and taught him that all men are created equal. That same familiar concept is enshrined in the Japanese Constitution, imposed by the American occupation in 1947 and still in force, not a word changed, 60 years later. When Mizoguchi made his film in 1954 the words must have been alive in his mind, reflecting his obsession with the rights of women throughout his career, and serving to condemn Sansho's slave camp (which mirrors those the Japanese ran in the Second World War). The story, we're told in a prefatory note, took place in "an era when mankind had not yet awakened as human beings." By that Mizoguchi may be referring both to the story and to aspects of traditional Japanese totalitarian society, in which everyone's role was rigidly defined, and authority flowed from the top down.

As the plot unfurls, we see Zushio and Anju trying to escape, lured by an evocative song that is sung to them by a recent prisoner from their village, and echoed too in a bird cry: "Zushio, Anju, come back, I need you." It is their mother's ghostly voice. The film incorporates this mystical summons into images of startling cruelty under Sansho, who causes prisoners to be branded on their foreheads if they try to escape. One who does not agree with this practice is Sansho's son, Taro, and it is an irony of the film that while Taro embraces resistance, Zushio begins to identify with Sansho and becomes the tyrant's surrogate son. Then he has a conversion, in a scene of surpassing beauty and emotion, as the film moves toward its final journey.

Kenji Mizoguchi (1898-1956) is considered, with Ozu and Kurosawa, one of Japan's greatest directors; for this film, and also "Song of Oharu," (1952) and "Ugetsu Monogatari" (1953), he won the Silver Lion, the grand prize, three years in a row at Venice, which was and remains unheard-of. He is known for the elegance of his compositions and the tact of his camera movement, and his theory "one scene, one shot," as in a famous scene in "Sansho" where the suicide by drowning of one of the characters is not shown, but merely indicated by ripples on the surface of a lake. Remarkably, since his characters always seem carefully composed within the frame, we learn that he never instructed the actors about where to move or stand, but simply indicated the desired result and let them move and place themselves. No doubt this leads to a subtly-sensed feeling of unstudied natural movement.

Ozu of course also adheres to "one scene, one shot," but his camera never moves, and framing and composition are everything. Mizoguchi's elegant camera movement almost creates the illusion that we are not only looking along with him, but sometimes looking away, choosing not to see. The camera does not move away from certain actions so much as decline to notice them, often because they are too painful or personal.

Mizoguchi made about 75 films, but of them all "Sansho" may contain the most autobiographical impulse. Living in poverty, Wikipedia reports, his family placed his older sister for adoption, and the adoptive family sold her as a geisha. His father treated the family brutally. Here are perhaps the reasons why the story of "Sansho," based on a 500-year-old folk tale, resonated so strongly in the director's mind.

Sometimes it is difficult to say exactly why a story strikes us with such power. In the case of "Sansho the Bailiff," it may be the unrelieved tragedy that strikes this good family for no good reason. They are not destroyed instantly, in a natural cataclysm, but separated for long years to know and experience their fates. That gives us time enough to know and believe the depth of Sansho's cruelty. Some humans are born without kindness or mercy, and do with pleasure what others could not do at all.