Backdropped by images of a poor 19th-century Japanese farming village high in the mountains, Orin, an aging but hearty woman (Sumiko Sakamoto) spends her 70th year preparing to follow the ancient tradition of ubasute and make a pilgrimage to the abode of the Mountain God, there to die of exposure or starvation, thus relieving her struggling community of the burden of keeping her alive. The story is a brutal fable of 'Nature, red of tooth and claw' in which nothing matters beyond survival, where life is held so valuably and yet so cheaply that an entire family is extirpated for the crime of stealing food, and unwanted babies are abandoned to die in the rice paddies. Against this brutal reality, Orin does what she can to help her family before she leaves, teaching her new daughter-in-law how to catch fish, conniving to relieve her hapless, foul-smelling youngest son of his virginity (before he disgraces the entire family with his revolting alternatives to conjugal bliss) and helping Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata) her eldest son come to peace with the idea of taking his beloved mother into the mountains to die. I found the film beautiful, compelling but sometimes hard to watch. While the brutal murder of an entire clan is the most painful sequence in the film, I found the most disturbing scene to be the realisation that the men carrying their elderly family members to the sacred place high in the mountains to die with dignity amongst the Gods, an ending so valued by Orin, were secretly told that they could just go partway throw the person off a cliff if they preferred. There is also a viscerally vivid scene where Orin, hoping to convince Tatsubei that she was aging beyond usefulness, deliberately smashes out her front teeth on a millwheel, an act mirrored by 47-year old Sakamoto, who had her four front teeth surgically extracted so she could play the role - demonstrating an almost pathological dedication to her craft. A central theme of the film, that humans are simply an extension of the cold, cruel, and complex natural world around them, is laid on pretty thick, as the activities of the characters are frequently mirrored by the creatures surrounding them, be it copulating, birthing, killing, eating, or dying. This is the second visualistion of the novel 'Narayama bushiko' by Shichiro Fukazawa, whose personal story is almost as grim and disturbing as is his tale of the sometimes amoral necessities of survival. Warning: some people will find this film repellent at many levels and for many reasons. Watched with English subtitles.
Review of The Ballad of Narayama
