This remake of "The Ballad of Narayama" has a very respectable rating of 7.7 and lots of very positive reviews. However, I found the film to be an endurance contest of unpleasantness. It also made its point through TONS of what my daughter terms 'sledgehammer symbolism'--where the director tries so hard to put forth their symbolism that it all becomes too tiresome and too obvious. Subtle this movie isn't!
This film is set in a time and place in Japan where life is very, very hard and starvation is the norm. To deal with this, the lovely people in these mountains have a tradition--that their elderly should go up in the mountains to die when they reach 70 so that they aren't a burden. Additionally, infanticide, stealing food and all other forms of nastiness abound in this hellish place. But director/writer Shôhei Imamura doesn't stop there--the film also has scenes of bestiality, LOTS of sex scenes (not the sexy kind, either), a family being buried alive, a woman knocking out her own teeth, a guy tossing his father down a mountain and animal abuse! Somehow Imamura seems to have forgotten necrophilia and incest!
As far as the symbolism goes, Imamura shows innumerable scenes of animals eating each other or copulating. It's VERY obvious he's trying to draw a parallel to say that these people are living like animals...too obvious. Plus, call me crazy, but I don't want to see all these scenes of animals killing each other or having sex!! Life is too short to watch stuff like this and although "The Ballad of Narayama" has nice production values, the thoroughly unpleasant nature of the film make it hard to recommend to anyone.
This film is set in a time and place in Japan where life is very, very hard and starvation is the norm. To deal with this, the lovely people in these mountains have a tradition--that their elderly should go up in the mountains to die when they reach 70 so that they aren't a burden. Additionally, infanticide, stealing food and all other forms of nastiness abound in this hellish place. But director/writer Shôhei Imamura doesn't stop there--the film also has scenes of bestiality, LOTS of sex scenes (not the sexy kind, either), a family being buried alive, a woman knocking out her own teeth, a guy tossing his father down a mountain and animal abuse! Somehow Imamura seems to have forgotten necrophilia and incest!
As far as the symbolism goes, Imamura shows innumerable scenes of animals eating each other or copulating. It's VERY obvious he's trying to draw a parallel to say that these people are living like animals...too obvious. Plus, call me crazy, but I don't want to see all these scenes of animals killing each other or having sex!! Life is too short to watch stuff like this and although "The Ballad of Narayama" has nice production values, the thoroughly unpleasant nature of the film make it hard to recommend to anyone.