It begins and ends with a mountainous landscape buried in snow, and it’s in between these winters that the story unfolds. Orin (Sumiko Sakamoto) is 69-years-old and in superb physical and mental condition. She’s nimble, good humoured, works hard, and has an impressive mouth full of teeth that her eldest son Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata) admiringly refers to as “rock-like.” Yet Orin’s fortitude is a source of embarrassment, something her fellow villagers in fact hold against her, because, to be aligned with local custom, at her age a body should be breaking down. At her age it’s time to say farewell to one’s family and climb on up to Mt. Narayama.
My guess is it’s a mixture of things: honour, superstition, and this agrarian community’s considerable poverty and general bad luck probably all contribute in some way to this ritual that has every member of the village being taken up to neighbouring Narayama by the age of 70 to die. This Darwinian spin on the old folks’ home seems at once brutish and in its way mystically comforting, with the image of Narayama being cultivated as one of heavenly togetherness. Before Orin finally makes her journey to Narayama we’re given a series of highly engaging impressions of just what sort of life she’s leaving behind, one of hardship, struggles against the cruel dictates of nature, and base satisfactions, from hunting and fishing and eating to violence and fornication and the release of bodily waste—the very first piece of action in the film finds two brothers running out of their hovel into the cold morning to piss in the mud and snow. Yet however primitive we deem these characters lives to be, there’s never the slightest implication that they’re any different from the modern audience watching their story unfold. The camera never looks down on them but rather looks them square in the eye.
The Ballad of Narayama (1983), though based on Shichirô Fukazawa’s stories, is classic Imamura, unsentimental but rife with pathos, casually vulgar, emphatically equating man with animals, observant of ritual and absurdities in every sort of scenario. As the master filmmaker, who died in 2006, famously said, “I am interested in the relationship of the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure.” Of course you’d be forgiven for not even knowing who Shohei Imamura is, since his prolific body of work—multiple-award-winning, spanning some 45 years, and of enormous significance to both Japanese and world cinema—is so rarely revived and still so woefully under-represented on DVD. Fortunately Animeigo’s recent release of The Ballad of Narayama makes one of his very best works, winner of the 1983 Palme d’Or, available to a larger audience.
Dead baby litter, bestiality, thievery, vandalism, patricide: the “simple folk” in Imamura’s world are not condescended to or treated as any less corrupted than the rest of us. While the primary narrative here concerns Orin’s preparations for Narayama—preparations that include everything from teaching her daughter-in-law how to fish to secretly knocking out her own teeth!—the film is essentially about examining how a community works, a pursuit that underlies a great deal of Imamura’s films, from his documentaries to The Pornographers (1966), his celebrated porn industry chronicle, to Black Rain (89), his devastating exploration of the lives lived by survivors of the atomic bomb, to his sprawling, magnificent box office bomb The Profound Desire of the Gods (68), a film set on a backward island that’s slowly being consumed by tourist industry, which in certain ways was a rehearsal for The Ballard of Narayama. In every case, how people, however sophisticated, are driven by fear, anxiety, desire and mythical thinking was of central concern to Imamura, and a tremendous, enduring source of humour, insight and resonance.
That Orin’s younger son Risuke (Tonpei Hidari, hilarious) stinks and can’t get laid, that hawks scoop up carrion intended for the villagers, that a ghost lingers shivering behind a tree even after rifles are fired at it, that crops don’t grow or families don’t get along: these are the everyday bursts of chaos that have to be reckoned with in The Ballad of Narayama. The danger with such storytelling is that things get so dispersed it becomes hard to connect with individual characters, but each of the leads here is lovingly detailed and textured, and, in particular, the development of Orin and Tetsuhei’s bond as their days together dwindle builds to a moving conclusion in the film’s mostly wordless final passages, an effect intensified by the weary, troubled but ultimately helpless subtext of Ogata’s performance. Best known in the west for his work in films like Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters (85) or Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine (79), Ogata really does have one of the most expressive faces in modern Japanese film.
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