Based on a novel drawn from a Japanese folk tale, Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff wants to be clear about its setting at the very start. Opening titles tell us that the story takes place in Japan’s “Dark Ages,” when “mankind had yet to awaken as human beings.” What follows is a dark and brutish slavery drama—especially for 1954—that becomes a fervent abolition movie.
We first meet Zushio and Anju as privileged young children of an unusually enlightened father (Masao Shimizu), who is governor of a rural province. “A man is not a human being without mercy,” he tells his family, explaining why he has refused to overtax the peasants under his authority. This does not go well with the powers that be, however, so he is banished. While traveling in search of a new home with their mother, Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka), the children are kidnapped and eventually sold to the cruel bailiff of the title (Eitaro Shindo). Zushio and Anju grow into adults as his property (eventually played by Yoshiaki Hanayagi and Kyoko Kagawa, respectively), when they must decide to fight for their freedom or accept their fate.
While hardly blind to the brutality and sadness of this story, Mizoguchi frames it with striking, compositional beauty. Elaborate period costumes—robes and hats that extend the pomp and presence of those who wear them—are often incorporated alongside grasses, reeds, and trees as part of the architecture of the mise en scene. The cinematography, by Kazuo Miyagawa, employs light and tone to give depth to each image, so that we can see far into the screen. The placid camera movements, meanwhile, involve hills and beaches in a way that reflects the inner lives of the characters. There is a rich, visual melancholy, then, to moments like the one where Tamaki sings to her children from an island off the coast of the mainland, as well as the later moment where Zushio and Anju hear the echo of her voice over the water. Here and elsewhere, the movie is crushing.
Sansho the Bailiff stands as a humanist landmark alongside something like Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, which would come out a year later. Yet had humanity really awakened and roused itself from darkness by the 1950s? Has it yet? Consider another film released in Japan in 1954: Godzilla. Godzilla stands as a lament over humankind’s appetite for destruction—particularly, the American bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima to end World War II. Sansho the Bailiff takes place, then, in a time and place that’s not as far removed as we might like to think. Yet it urges us to awaken anyway.
(3/10/2023)
