The Ballad of Narayama (1958) [The Criterion Collection] – Blu-ray Disc

***½/**** Image B+ Sound A Extras C
starring Kinuyo Tanaka, Teiji Takahashi, Yuko Mochizuki, Danko Ichikawa
screenplay by Keisuke Kinoshita from the novel by Shichiro Fukazawa
directed by Keisuke Kinoshita




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by Bryant Frazer The Ballad of Narayama, a 1958 film by Keisuke Kinoshita, a Shochiku studio stablemate of
Ozu and Mizoguchi, opens with an unconventional gambit for a Japanese melodrama
from the 1950s. A masked M.C. knocking two blocks of wood together
matter-of-factly announces the film’s title and offers a brief abstract of its
content. The fabric behind him proves to be a curtain, drawn aside after the credits are displayed–Narayama is staged as theatre, filmed by a movie
camera. The voiceover narration, accompanied by music plucked on a shamisen,
draws on traditional Japanese styles of drama. The sets are lavishly dressed
with flowers, trees, and even gently burbling brooks. And Kinoshita’s repeated
strategy of changing sets in full view of the camera by pushing platforms to
the side, casting a shadow across a character, or suddenly dropping a curtain
or background to reveal a new scene behind, is borrowed from the kabuki
tradition.

RUNNING TIME
98 minutes
MPAA
Not Rated
ASPECT
RATIO(S)

2.40:1 (1080p/MPEG-4)
LANGUAGES
Japanese 1.0 LPCM
SUBTITLES
English

REGION
A
DISC
TYPE

BD-50
STUDIO
Criterion

I suppose Kinoshita indulges in artifice
partly because the film’s subject matter is simply too much to bear straight
up. The Ballad of Narayama is about a purported tradition of abandoning
the elderly, consigning them to death by exposure or starvation. The Japanese
have a word for this (Ubasute), and although the historical basis is unclear, the recurring story–an eldest son hauls his mother to a mountain
summit and leaves her there to die, alone–has survived
through centuries of folklore. (The early version most often cited by scholars
is a 15th-century Noh play by Zeami, and ubasute is apparently mentioned in the 12th-century Konjaku Monogatari.) It’s a powerful story for obvious reasons
having to do with the relationship children have to their aging parents, like
the increased psychological and financial pressures that may come to bear as a
mother or father nears death. It may be a powerful Japanese story for somewhat less
apparent reasons, including more culturally specific ideas about shame and
honour. With the advancement of old age comes not just the slow encroachment of
decrepitude and a general decline in independence, but also a loss of privacy
that can be devastating.

Certainly The Ballad of Narayama‘s
main character, Orin, a 69-year-old woman living in poverty with her family,
has a bellyful of shame. Played by the great actress (and director!) Kinuyo
Tanaka, Orin is a weak yet genuinely cheery woman hunched over from age and
possessed of crippling self-awareness. She has maintained all her original
teeth despite her advancing years, but to Orin those teeth are a source of
discomfort. She believes they suggest gluttony–a grandmother who sits around
the house, ravenously slurping down big meals and leaving her family with less.
Her sense of the matter is reinforced by the other villagers, who sing out in
mocking tones about her “demon teeth”–an act of breathtaking cruelty
given Orin’s position. In her village, men and women who reach their seventieth year
are given what is considered by local cultural norms a good death: Taken to the
top of nearby Narayama, they meet their demise with the knowledge that they will
no longer be a burden on their families. With that end looming,
self-consciousness about one’s teeth may seem like small potatoes, but Orin
takes this stuff quite seriously. In one of the film’s more viscerally
wrenching moments, she dashes her face against the edge of a millstone,
knocking those telltale chompers out for good.

Within Orin’s family, there are factions.
Her widowed son, Tatsuhei (Teiji Takahashi), loves her very much and is
distressed at the idea of her journey to the mountaintop. The same goes for
Tatsuhei’s new wife, Tamayan (Yuko Mochizuki), whom Orin welcomes into the
family selflessly, with offerings of precious food. Her grandson Kesakichi
(Danko Ichikawa), by contrast, can’t wait for the old woman to drop dead. His knocked-up
girlfriend, you see, is eating for two, and the couple isn’t shy about
reminding Orin that she’s old and in the way. A neighbour man, Mata, refuses
to take the journey; he is eventually bound and carried up the mountain by
force. Orin, on the other hand, is placid about the endeavour. Ironically, it falls upon her to
comfort Tatsuhei about their trip to Narayama rather than the other way
around.

Orin’s cool acceptance of her fate is
crucial to the film’s general mood, which wraps layers of beauty and stoicism around
a core of metaphysical terror. The Ballad of Narayama is a
lushly-produced period piece that highlights the skills of the Shochiku studio
craftspeople with a moving camera that tracks every which way through the complex, busy sets, showcasing the mammoth undertaking it must have
been to build each one. (Even the wind can be seen blowing through these
cinematic spaces.) And it’s finely performed, with Tanaka and the rest of the
troupe precisely locating their characters across an emotional spectrum ranging
from disconsolation to indifference. Kinoshita offers lush visual cues,
too–some scenes are bathed entirely in red or green light. But eventually,
most conventional narrative trappings fall away, and we are left with the story
of a man with a wooden chair strapped to his back, in which sits his elderly
mother, her small, silent gestures pushing him ever forwards, urging him up
Narayama.

It’s in the final act, which
chronicles that slow ascent, that The Ballad of Narayama takes on a
genuinely otherworldly tone. I hate to say too much about it; the film casts a
spell here, in its most desolate moments, as the rich, saturated colours of the
first hour give way to more monochromatic tones and the formerly busy screen
space is mostly emptied out. I’ll note that the generally loose,
mournful musical score (composer Chûji Kinoshita is the director’s brother)
takes on, in its increasing urgency, a fiercely contemporary edge. Suddenly, it
sounds almost like rock music, with a driving 4/4 beat underneath staccato
plucking in a higher register. More crucially, Kinoshita brings his vision of
the human tragedy–the progression of lives from carefree youth into an adulthood
burdened by poverty, guilt, responsibility, you name it–into focus. There’s a
single moment where the intertwined story threads of the mother’s journey and
the son’s briefly become one, as he turns to leave her behind and their two
bodies briefly assume the same weary position in the frame. These rhyming
figures at Narayama’s summit suggest a sorrowful, lifelong choreography–how we
children and parents, locked on a trajectory to oblivion with only a generation
of distance between us, move in sympathy, even at the end of the line.


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THE BLU-RAY DISC
Criterion’s budget Blu-ray of The Ballad of Narayama features no extras
at all, save two different trailers (one identified as a teaser). A booklet
essay by film critic Philip Kemp is left to do the heavy lifting of putting the picture in context and succeeds pretty well. The disc is, nonetheless, a
welcome addition to the company’s expansive line-up of Japanese cinema,
bringing a new 2K digital master produced by Shochiku and Japanese post giant
Imagica to the table. According to the liner notes, a 35mm wetgate
interpositive was printed from the damaged camera negative and scanned at 4K,
and then digital restoration work was done at 2K resolution. Although Criterion pegs the
new transfer at 2.35:1, it actually measures closer to 2.4:1 (not a big
deal, as the latter aspect is closer to the projection aperture for a ‘scope
print). The results are impressive. The opening title sequence is quite
grainy, but it’s also one long optical effect. When the movie proper begins,
that harsher layer of grain falls away, replaced by a more velvety shimmer that
seems fairly appropriate to the film’s age.

In fact, it’s possible that Criterion’s Blu
looks too good. You can clearly see seams, wrinkles, and other telltale
imperfections in the painted backdrops of the sets that were probably invisible
in theatres, obscured by the extra grain added in the striking of theatrical
prints. Despite this, the image isn’t especially sharp as HD goes, but
slightly soft edges are endemic to anamorphic lenses of the period–indeed,
that characteristic is a big part of what gives these films their apparent
lushness, and the look is faithfully reproduced here. I detected no evidence of
edge-sharpening or aggressive de-noising. While the monaural audio, rendered
as an uncompressed PCM track mastered at 24-bits, isn’t particularly dynamic, it is clean and undistorted across the frequency range. It was probably tempting to compress this release to fit on a BD-25, but Criterion has gone the
distance with a 26.9 GB transfer that just tips the scales into BD-50 territory.

Unfortunately, there is one short passage
beginning at 36:03 and lasting until 36:25 where frames have been
double-printed so that the motion on screen appears jittery as the camera
tracks past a copse of trees with bright red autumn leaves. The effect reminded
some reviewers of what happens when a computer’s buffer is momentarily
overwhelmed by a rush of video at a high data-rate, though examining the
footage frame by frame reveals that every other film frame does seem to be
reproduced exactly twice, replacing alternate frames of the original footage. I
have no idea what sort of problems with the source material would manifest
themselves in this fashion; alerted to the defect by other writers, Criterion
maintains that it’s an artifact of the original Shochiku restoration as opposed to anything introduced in the encoding process for home video. I believe
them, but I’d love to know more about the circumstances that led to the issue in the first place, and whether it’s a legit restoration tactic in the face of
damaged footage or a glitch somewhere in the process that somehow went
unnoticed until the new masters were created. Though it’s a
relatively minor glitch in the grand scheme, it mars an otherwise top-drawer release.


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