User reviews

"Sansho the Bailiff" is a cinematic retelling of a 1000 year old folk tale. The story centers around a prosperous family that was disgraced due to the father's progressive ideas (fairness and equality for peasants). With the father in exile, the mother and 2 young children must undertake a difficult journey to join him, but they are ambushed by bandits and sold into slavery. This is the story of each family member's determination to reunite.

It's an excellent film, well deserving of all the praise it has received. In terms of cinematography and visual poetry, it's the kind of film where each frame could be a photo to hang on your wall. Shots are carefully composed with perfect balance, and although it's in black & white, we get the full, layered spectrum of every grey known to the human eye.

But as you watch this, here's an interesting tidbit that may enhance your interest. Pay close attention to the roles of women in the story, because that's what makes this work fascinating as not only a social statement but as a psychoanalysis of the great director Kenji Mizoguchi himself. At the time of this film's release (1954) and certainly in medieval times, women in Japan were horribly oppressed. Even in folk art, drama and literature, their characters traditionally played subservient and 2-dimensional roles. But here Mizoguchi turns that upside down, in a subtle way. Our 2 heroines (the mother and daughter) are, despite their physical limitations, the strongest of character and will, and they are the ones propelling the story forward. This mirrors the director's personal experience and, evidently, his private pain.

Raised in poverty, Mizoguchi witnessed the struggles, sacrifices and ultimately the determination of the women in his life (mother, sister) who suffered in order to give him the opportunities he needed to succeed. If you keep this in mind as you watch this, I guarantee your appreciation of this film will be expanded. Much like Mozart's famous opera "Don Giovanni" was his catharsis over his own father's sacrifices (and tyranny), here in "Sansho the Bailiff" we get Mizoguchi's heart open wide, showing us how he perceives the women in his life as the fighters, the rebels, the spirits of determination, tenacity and sacrifice. As a social message, this film certainly delivered ideas ahead of its time, but perhaps more poignant is the rare peek into the mind, the demons and the secret debt Mizoguchi felt he owed to those who taught him the meaning of strength.

Luminous...painterly...haunting...devastating...in terms of both substance and style, a cinematic achievement of the very highest order. Like all great works of art, it is incomparable, although it would not be misleading to place it in the company of the very best of Renoir, Ford, and Kurosawa. It has the same kind of compassionate humanism, high-caliber storytelling, and effortless-seeming mastery of the medium...the same generosity.

I prefer this film even to the great (and much better-known) Ugetsu. And I know now why Welles once said that Mizoguchi "can't be praised enough, really." I hope one day this film will be as well known as it deserves to be.

The first time I saw this film was when I was in university. It impressed me greatly then. Watching it again recently invoked the same emotion - I was deeply saddened by the horrific acts one human can do to the other. And guess what, a century later the human race has not really advanced that much in this area.

While the film also highlights the noble side of us - compassion and mercy to the weak, maintenance of integrity amid suffering - it is the downside of it that gets me. I finished the movie feeling depressed, as I did several decades ago.

Super B/W photography, a good story, and masterly directing by Mizoguchi make this a classic film of all time. Find an evening when you yearn for artistic fulfillment, and yet are prepared to pay an emotional price for it. Highly recommended for the serious film buffs.

"Sansho the Bailiff" (Japanese, 1954): Kenji Mizoguchi made an epic film from what was (apparently) a centuries-old Japanese morality tale. We watch a well-to-do family slowly disintegrate - not from events they cause, but those out of their control. How they each react, how they deal with the passing years and events, and how they find solutions (if any) are powerful, emotional, lessons in life. Can a half-century old Japanese film be useful to a contemporary American audience? Of course it can. Human issues of love, devotion, honor, greed, lust, hate, violence, sadness, and revenge are, if anything, in further need of consideration and dealing. To enhance these thoughts, the musical scoring is superb (I love classical Japanese music), the photography is in gorgeous black/gray/white with artful composing, the pacing is patient and more explanatory than many Japanese films (perhaps Mizoguchi had foreign audiences in mind – which I appreciate!), and I often felt like I was watching delicate woodcut prints come to life.

Man's inhumanity to man is presented here with no artifice. This has long been a favorite of mine, although it's difficult to sell many others on the premise -- an honest, benevolent Governor in medieval Japan is imprisoned by the military regime, forcing his wife, son, and daughter to fend for themselves. They are soon captured, separated, and sold into slavery, but remained determined to reunite.

There's something about the medieval Japanese setting that lends itself to explorations of grandiose themes painted with a broad brush. This will break your heart, and belongs on your shelf next to "Ran".

I'm so moved. This is not only one of the greatest film of Mizoguchi but also tell us a very important precept which is almost forgotten. That is "Without mercy, a man is not a human being. Be hard on yourself, but merciful to others." This is very important precept, but how many people still know or remember it? I'd like to use this film for children's educational program. Now I know why "Sansho the Bailiff" was voted for No.1 film of the year beating so many great films like "La Dolce Vita", "Psycho" and so on.

Sansho The Bailiff, Japanese film director Kenji Mizoguchi's movie that won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, opens this season's Japanese Film Festival, and while the titular character happens to be one of the villains in the story, and not even that of a lead character, it's no surprise why this movie was chosen as the opener as it fit the theme of this year's festival to a tee, that of the power of women and femininity. Also, since Kinuyo Tanaka is the actress/director-in-focus as well, this is but one of the movies in her illustrious career that she had worked with all the masters of Japanese Cinema.

But to me, it served as an introduction to both the work of director Kenji Mizoguchi, as well as actress Kinuyo Tanaka, and watching the movie as is without in depth knowledge of the socio-political background that this movie is based, I found it rather hard to appreciate the grandeur of this highly acclaimed epic, but nonetheless it served as a good start to want me to revisit the filmography of Mizoguchi, and perhaps learn from scratch and see his evolving into a cinematic master.

Telling the story of a family ruined and separated by river pirates when the head of a household, a governor no less, gets sent into exile, the movie follows two threads, one with the wife Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka) being sold to prostitution, while the children, Zushio (first played by Masahiko Kato, and then by Yoshiaki Hanayagi) and Anju (Keiko Enami, and Kyoko Kagawa) get sent off to live as slaves in a household run by the titular character (Eitaro Shindo). We get first hand glimpse of the hardship of the lives of the children, where escapees from their confinement get branded permanently with a mark to their foreheads. Although clinging onto their father's wise teachings on humanity, the children, growing up in such a harsh environment, slowly get jaded, and before you know it, Zushio doesn't bat an eyelid when he gets to met punishment amongst fellow slaves.

This is a tale about one man's redemption, turnaround and exacting sweet vengeance, but not before learning the mistakes of his ways, and suffering terrible loss along the way serving as a wake up call. It's akin to the likes of other classics such as Ben-Hur, and I thought Zushio's tale can be split into 4 parts - as a kid from a good family stature being stripped of everything leaving a very thin sliver of humanity from which to cling from, followed by his awakening from his tragic loss of kin - which was the much talked about haunting scene in the movie - and then his rise to power through a series of positive coincidences, before ending again with his personal sacrifice to look for his long lost mother, whose song in the town she resided in served as clues as to her whereabouts.

While I have no qualms that this movie is indeed assuredly shot, I think long-time readers would likely guess by now that I'm not really a fan of long shots and extended takes. It took its time to tell its story and there are a few moments which looked really comical, even when it's not supposed to, like the behaviour of the mob which fit the intended mentality.

That said, I might give Sansho the Bailiff another go, since it has been given the Criterion treatment, and hopefully on a DVD I would have cultivated enough patience to appreciate the movie a lot more than this first viewing on the big screen.

Yep, times were tough in 11th century Japan. If you were a peasant, that is, or lumped into the same class, as the brother and sister main characters are.

Apart from a few high-quality moments, this film really failed to grab me. Perhaps it was because I'd seen RED BEARD shortly before. There are parallels between these two, and SD comes out a clear second-best. Whereas RB deals with horrid poverty using a broad range of human emotions (including much humour), SD is almost unremittingly depressing.

Yes, I felt for the characters and their plights, but the disjointed nature of the story and sudden changes of fortune made that feeling difficult to maintain. A lot of discussion about people being sold into slavery reminded me, curiously, of Dickens. Again, the comparison isn't favourable.

Probably an important film, and likely to be effective with a Japanese audience. Nevertheless, I cannot recommend rushing to see it.

With tears of emotions the word "masterpiece" begins to develop on my lips. Incapable to speak it out loud, a gentle smile surrounds my face. I am deeply blessed. (This is my immediate reaction after having finished watching "Sansho".)

In long, meditative shots, Mizoguchi fluently tells the story of two siblings who get separated from their mother and have to work for a cruel slave owner. It is an old legend of destitution and revenge, brought in pictures so beautiful, that you would want to frame each and every one of it and hang them up above your bed. Those are pictures of utter elegance, extreme subtlety and an intoxicating abstinence of brutality, of vain love and the slam of fate, which form that one condition people usually call life.

Probably the best film I have seen in 2006.

This is the second film I saw by Kenji Mizoguchi (the first one being Ugetsu). Sansho the Bailiff is a gripping and moving story of the importance of ideals and virtue in a world of misery and harshness. It captured the silver lion at Venice in 1954, along with Seven Samurai. This film is a masterpiece, and Mizoguchi is one of the greatest directors of all time. His films portray the dramatic "story" perfectly. A Mizoguchi film lets you not simply watch a narrative, but feel it and experience it as well, more so than in most other movies you'll probably watch. His most moving moments, including the ending in Sansho, as well as Ugetsu, produce moments of genuine pathos in the viewer: their is no hint of over-dramatization or sentimentality. Simply stunning.

I would this film a 9.5/10, only because Ugetsu (which I gave 10/10) is more perfect in its devastation (yes, everything is relative). Watch it, treasure every moment of it, and hope a DVD will come out in the near future.

Beautifully shot tragedy about a brother and sister taken from privilege and sold into slavery, and their journey of loss, redemption and sacrifice. Rightly a classic, but is perhaps a little too quick paced for its own good; director Mizoguchi wanted to focus more on the title character and slavery, but ended up getting overruled into focusing on a broken family piecing their lives back together. There is just too much beauty in the setting and tone for a critic to pry at what might be missing. The black-and-white not only sets the mood, but is visually stunning, as if each scene is a moving photograph—particularly when the family is traveling through fields of miscanthus sinensis (Chinese silver grass).

***½ (out of four)

Set in medieval Japan, this tale follows the children of a nobleman through their fall from nobility. Despite great hardships and cruelty they remain true to their father's message to have mercy for all.

Despite this being a plot-driven film, Mizoguchi lets the camera slowly pan across and linger on the forest, water, and villages. Scenes are expertly crafted--in a scene of violence, the act is captured only through sound and by seeing the faces of the horrified witnesses.

Unfortunately, the character development leaves something be desired. The motivations of the main characters is mostly clear. However, the characters are all either saints or devils, with no nuance. There's only a single case of character development in the entire film.

Despite this, I grew to appreciate this film more after reading the IMDB review by rooprect, which points out how women are the strongest characters in the film, a narrative which goes against the times in which this film was set and those in which Mizoguchi was doing his work.

Lately I have been puzzling over Mizoguchi. I have been captivated every time by a heart of reflective images, but have had to work to unearth these against what is usually acclaimed about him. In simple terms, I think what is so vital about Mizoguchi has been obscured by precisely what has given rise to his reputation here in the West.

I think the mistake lies in evaluating Mizoguchi within the limits of what James Quandt wrote about him for the centenary retrospective: "Mizoguchi is cinema's Shakespeare, its Bach or Beethoven, its Rembrant, Titian or Picasso." That is not quite so, of course. But here in the West we have understood images and the world from them in terms of theater; we expect a grand stage where destiny is revealed by conflict. We expect to be moved or educated, to have our heartstrings tugged from outside. We expect an irrational world to be rationalized and given coherence to as a narrative. Mizoguchi does all those things some would say masterfully, and it's under those terms that we have evaluated him; a profound humanist, powerful elegies, social critique.

But in the Eastern world, in our case Japan, they have understood images in the light of the practice of seeing. They have chronicles, myth, stories, all these things that we have also used to narrate our world and which Mizoguchi works from. But they also have their cessation, adopted from Buddhist China.

We have poorly understood this tranquility as a matter of simply aesthetic consideration, this must explain why comments on Mizoguchi's visual prowess rest with vague mentions of 'lyricism'. We expect beauty from representation, an illustrative beauty. Indicative of this loss in translation comes as early as Van Gogh when he copied 'The Plum Garden at Kameido' for just its idyllic scenery.

It is that abstraction from the Buddhist eye refined on the Noh stage or the painter's scroll that interests me in Mizoguchi, himself a converted Buddhist near the end of his life.

So beneath histrionics we can easily process as conventional tragedy, there are powerful karmas at work powering life from one world to the next, here about brother and sister reborn from nobility to forced labor and out again. There is painterly space cultivated with the mournful beauty of transience. There are soft edges, clear reflections.

So not an aspiration to just formal beauty, but a way of cultivating images embedded with the practice of seeing that gives rise to them. A way of moving the world to where our hearstrings are. The result effortlessly radiates outwards with beauty from disciplined soul. It's a different thing from impressionists who, in painting as well as film, lacked the disciplined practice that we find in Buddhist art; so they painted looking to see.

I have puzzled over Mizoguchi because, all else aside, this reflective seeing is not always well integrated with the outer layers that resolve emotionally. It's like a transparent Japanese image has been plastered on top with all manner of Western-influenced frescoes - influences Mizoguchi practiced since the 30s. So even though both Oharu and this end with profound glances of a fleeting suffering world, it is just too much work trying to find their proper emptiness to let them settle.