| Chris Polley |
Sansho the Bailiff plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, May 15th, through Sunday, May 17th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Breaking up families, the oppressed becoming the oppressor, the government sanctioning open and wanton cruelty on the streets—sound familiar? When I got offered the chance to write about Kenji Mizoguchi’s folktale-inspired 1954 epic Sansho the Bailiff this past winter amid Operation Metro Surge and just weeks after the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, I immediately felt the connection. It was deep in my bones. I’m a teacher in the Columbia Heights Public Schools district, where I also live and send my own children. I was mere blocks from the abduction of Liam Conejo Ramos and his father. Community leaders I know personally were there as observers shouting at ICE agents to let them go and to get away from the apartment building where Liam’s mother and sibling were trapped and being forced to choose between getting separated from their loved ones and saving themselves from getting sent to Dilley Detention Center in Texas.
There is a scene in Sansho that, upon rewatch in particular, recalls this very current event and is a candidate for the title of Most Terrifying Scene in Cinematic History. Following Tamaki (a gut-wrenching Kinuyo Tanaka) and her children Anju and Zushiō as they journey to reunite with the family patriarch (who has been banished from his position as governor for, essentially, displaying moral fortitude), mother and children are separated when tricked and captured by a sex trafficker and slave trader. The blood-curdling screams, the vicious misanthropy, and the desperate cries of youth are all directed with austere honesty by Mizoguchi, whose naturalistic and one-take tendency lends the event further visceral impact. From there, we watch with trembling hope to see if reunification ever happens as the now-older Anju (played with delicate power by Kyōko Kagawa) and Zushiō (a heart-breaking Eitarō Shindō) toil in the titular Sansho’s brutal labor camp and Tamaki is miles away in an unknown brothel.
Many critics have pontificated about why Mizoguchi’s film is named after a minor character who serves only as the manifestation of evil (like if a movie dramatizing the events of Liam’s family was named Bovino the Commander), and I’ll gladly add to that discourse: It boldly implies the monolithic force that evil has always had and will continue to have on the world. As Scott Tobias writes for The Reveal, “The film was made in 1954 and surely there was some intent on Mizoguchi’s part to ruminate over the lessons of World War II without addressing it directly, particularly the connection between Sansho’s slave compound and the brutality of concentration camps.” What’s the first name that comes to mind when discussing World War II? Unfortunately, it’s not the countless victims or the heroes, it’s Hitler. Or, perhaps, for Japan, it’s Truman. Either way, titling the film Sansho the Bailiff is an aggressive reminder of both how history is written and, especially considering the film’s emotional final scene, how scars rarely heal and evil haunts after it’s gone.
With a message so devastating (yet accurate), Mizoguchi hammers home his other message of the indefatigable force of evil inherent to humanity by altering the source material for maximum effect. Teng-Kuan Ng notes for the Journal for Religion, Film and Media, “In all other versions of the folktale [upon which the film is based] the children maintain their childlike purity despite their vicissitudes. Only in Mizoguchi’s film does Zushiō fall from innocence. His heart gradually becomes callused from the injustice of their fate.” The midsection of Sansho’s narrative ruthlessly depicts the subjugation of men as something that is, at best, a toxic but arguably necessary survival skill, or, at worst, acutely contagious and cyclical, both of which seem to be despicable but true facts in the hellscape that is America today in, say, the number of Latinos who join the ranks of ICE or voted for Trump despite being disproportionately targeted and profiled by ICE.
Mizoguchi isn’t all doom and gloom, though, which is what makes his masterpiece as soaringly hopeful as it is deeply despondent. Perhaps most significantly is how he characterizes and develops the women in his stories, including even the most minor of characters. Both Tamaki and Anju are deftly considered and admired, though not without their complexities or fragility, and the small but important role of Namiji (a profoundly empathetic Kimiko Tachibana), who serves as surrogate mother to Anju and Zushiō on Sansho’s estate, is equally integral to the story’s heart and moral center. “He places [women] at a level to which the humanity shines more, for with the men, humanity is being taken away, adding more to the frightening image left behind,” observes Jaime Rebanal for Cinema from the Spectrum. There’s a mountain of sadness underneath this and after it, of course, but Mizoguchi still lets his female characters stand tall, even if they are not long for this dark, patriarchal world.
Not to sound like a broken record, but the corollary to the federal occupation of the Twin Cities in this case is almost too on-the-nose, not just with the extrajudicial killing of Renée Good, who instantly became a symbol of the resistance, but also with the largely women-led mutual aid networks that sprung up in the midst of fascist disorder and disruption. Through grassroots organizational efforts and diligent community safeguarding, that would not have gotten done without the work of countless mothers, sisters, and daughters of Minnesota, we persevered (and are continuing to). And this is true too for who, in the film’s third act, becomes Mizoguchi’s de facto protagonist, Zushiō, who finds his way not on his own but by direct inspiration and guidance from Anju and Tamaki (and, yes, the noble words of his absent father, which is likely also not a coincidence).
Surely, I can’t wrap up this reverse allegory without mentioning the part that nature plays in both settings: the frigid tundra of the Great North representing the strength and resilience of the rebellion in our timeline, and the brutal, feudal landscape of ancient Japan representing the rigid, industrially primitive regime in the other. “Natural beauty serves as a point of contrast and also as an enduring spectator, a kind of great ordering principle that makes human suffering seem all the more futile and needless, but also more mysteriously poignant and inevitable,” writes Chris Wisniewski for Reverse Shot. From the aristocratic interior sparseness beholden to the ruling class to the harsh exteriors the underclass is forced to endure, it’s no wonder many have drawn comparisons between Mizoguchi’s sense of place to that of Terrence Malick or Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
Of course, this kind of stringent, borderline clinical style is not for all, just as life in the fourth coldest state in America isn’t either. Tadao Sato summarized for Film Criticism in 1980, “While Kenji Mizoguchi was greatly applauded as a realist, as an inquirer into human nature, and as an esthetic artist, a great deal of criticism asserted that his strong attachment to old manners was a form of escape, and that the lengths of his shots and the slackness of his tempo reflected conservatism in cinematic methodology.” And perhaps that’s where Kristi Noem and company miscalculated messing with Minnesota: they mistook our quiet tenacity for mild stoicism. We’re not okay after (but also still very much in the middle of all) this, but we are not mannered because we can be easily pushed around; in fact, we are this way because we are immovable. Fuck ICE. Long live cinema.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon