"The Ballad of Narayama" had always been presented to me with an aura of mystery tainted with fascination; the story of a son carrying his mother the top of a mountain so she could die in peace. So much poetry in the premise I couldn't resist.
I tried to watch the original but time screwed up my arrangements and put the remake in my hand first and it's within my personal desire to watch Golden Palm winners that I saw it. It's interesting that the previous film I watched in that category was the Turkish "Winter Sleep", a film with the same hivernal setting allowing people to introspect onto their lives. "Nayarama" has the same setting but is less existential and more colorful, to say the least. It's not exactly the picture I expected, and director Shohei Imamura depicted a gallery of peasants with an eagerness to emphasize their crassness that he reminded me of Antonioni and his "Ugly, Dirty and Bad" slum people. I guess I'm still partial to the more poetic flourishes of Kurosawa.
I understand the positive reception (it's Cannes after all) but I didn't enjoy "Nayarama" even to the degree that I could grasp its inner poetry. Honestly, maybe it's the discontentment brought up by the Covid context but I found the film to be a succession of unpleasant characters indulging to the worst practices. I find myself guilty not to be able to appreciate the social comment and the magic of the camera beneath the ugliness they depict but what can I say about a film that shows a dead baby soaking in a rice field. Scenes of sexual games that involve into rapes or just plain rapes? Of mass lynching consisting of burying people alive, including a pregnant mother and children? Of brutality against animals? Or sons urging their grandmothers to die, same grandmother who lures a woman into a deadly trap... and break his teeth in a very cringe worthy scene.
And so on and so forth. I understand that a film isn't entitled to portray goodness in every frame, maybe the bad is the foil to the good, we're flooded with images of perversion only to highlight in contrast the majesty of nature, or say the purity of the mountain when covered by snow, it hides with its drape of white the sight of skeletons rotting under crows and scavengers... but my issue isn't just with the form. I believe there is a problem with the content too, one that left me confused, to use a neutral term. The film jumps from one barrack of a village to another to another and left me puzzled most the time. I will be honest but at times I couldn't tell the characters apart, except for Ken Ogata who plays the straight and dutiful son Tatsuhei and his mother Orin, played by Sumiko Sakamoto. The colorful and comic relief character named "the stinker" looked a lot like his other sibling and I couldn't recognize many of the female characters.
It was a difficult film to follow and I wish it could take us to one direction, but I wasn't able to follow it until I got to the point where Tatsuhei took his mother to the mountain. Finally I thought and that part, which is only one quarter of the film (maybe less) worked like a relief from all the mess that went before, I didn't feel there was any connection whatsoever with the first, except to show us a slice of life in the ancient Japanese rural town, far from the more forgiving lyricism depiction of Kurosawa (who didn't sugarcoat them in "Seven Samurai"). After the film we understand that there was a time where life and death were handled rather cynically and that could only be shown through the unforgiving eye of Imamura and his documentary-like style of directing.
There are many scenes of people having sex that are intercut with animals, in fact, many shots randomly thrown in the film, seem to magnify the fauna and flora as if the point was to establish the bestiality of men and their being part of the natural cycle, which makes the mountain tradition and understandable necessity and a paradox. Even in times where people indulged to actions we'd deem as savage, there was room for secular traditions and yet these traditions didn't exclude nature. Any deviation or disobedience would bring shame upon a family and let a soul wander in limbo of nothingness. The point isn't that some traditions or superstitions would be pointless (why a woman be taken to a mountain if even at 69 she's in good health?) but that the worse would come from absence of tradition.
It was a long way from these traditions to our modern and civilized societies, but maybe the film shows that thin breach civilization took to find its way despite men's savagery. Still, for all the meaningful richness of the film the whole experience was so unpleasant that there came a moment I couldn't pinpoint exactly and I was like "what am I watching this?". What's the purpose of all these characters? Of having them being so unpleasant. I couldn't tell. There's a point of them acting so ugly but there was a limit to which I could endure this ugliness.
Imamura is one of the few directors with two Golden Palm winners, I liked "The Eel" a bit more but I thought the climax was misplaced, this time, I didn't enjoy "Nayarama" but I'm glad it reached its peak (literally) with the right scene. I'm looking forward to seeing the original but not with the same urge.
I tried to watch the original but time screwed up my arrangements and put the remake in my hand first and it's within my personal desire to watch Golden Palm winners that I saw it. It's interesting that the previous film I watched in that category was the Turkish "Winter Sleep", a film with the same hivernal setting allowing people to introspect onto their lives. "Nayarama" has the same setting but is less existential and more colorful, to say the least. It's not exactly the picture I expected, and director Shohei Imamura depicted a gallery of peasants with an eagerness to emphasize their crassness that he reminded me of Antonioni and his "Ugly, Dirty and Bad" slum people. I guess I'm still partial to the more poetic flourishes of Kurosawa.
I understand the positive reception (it's Cannes after all) but I didn't enjoy "Nayarama" even to the degree that I could grasp its inner poetry. Honestly, maybe it's the discontentment brought up by the Covid context but I found the film to be a succession of unpleasant characters indulging to the worst practices. I find myself guilty not to be able to appreciate the social comment and the magic of the camera beneath the ugliness they depict but what can I say about a film that shows a dead baby soaking in a rice field. Scenes of sexual games that involve into rapes or just plain rapes? Of mass lynching consisting of burying people alive, including a pregnant mother and children? Of brutality against animals? Or sons urging their grandmothers to die, same grandmother who lures a woman into a deadly trap... and break his teeth in a very cringe worthy scene.
And so on and so forth. I understand that a film isn't entitled to portray goodness in every frame, maybe the bad is the foil to the good, we're flooded with images of perversion only to highlight in contrast the majesty of nature, or say the purity of the mountain when covered by snow, it hides with its drape of white the sight of skeletons rotting under crows and scavengers... but my issue isn't just with the form. I believe there is a problem with the content too, one that left me confused, to use a neutral term. The film jumps from one barrack of a village to another to another and left me puzzled most the time. I will be honest but at times I couldn't tell the characters apart, except for Ken Ogata who plays the straight and dutiful son Tatsuhei and his mother Orin, played by Sumiko Sakamoto. The colorful and comic relief character named "the stinker" looked a lot like his other sibling and I couldn't recognize many of the female characters.
It was a difficult film to follow and I wish it could take us to one direction, but I wasn't able to follow it until I got to the point where Tatsuhei took his mother to the mountain. Finally I thought and that part, which is only one quarter of the film (maybe less) worked like a relief from all the mess that went before, I didn't feel there was any connection whatsoever with the first, except to show us a slice of life in the ancient Japanese rural town, far from the more forgiving lyricism depiction of Kurosawa (who didn't sugarcoat them in "Seven Samurai"). After the film we understand that there was a time where life and death were handled rather cynically and that could only be shown through the unforgiving eye of Imamura and his documentary-like style of directing.
There are many scenes of people having sex that are intercut with animals, in fact, many shots randomly thrown in the film, seem to magnify the fauna and flora as if the point was to establish the bestiality of men and their being part of the natural cycle, which makes the mountain tradition and understandable necessity and a paradox. Even in times where people indulged to actions we'd deem as savage, there was room for secular traditions and yet these traditions didn't exclude nature. Any deviation or disobedience would bring shame upon a family and let a soul wander in limbo of nothingness. The point isn't that some traditions or superstitions would be pointless (why a woman be taken to a mountain if even at 69 she's in good health?) but that the worse would come from absence of tradition.
It was a long way from these traditions to our modern and civilized societies, but maybe the film shows that thin breach civilization took to find its way despite men's savagery. Still, for all the meaningful richness of the film the whole experience was so unpleasant that there came a moment I couldn't pinpoint exactly and I was like "what am I watching this?". What's the purpose of all these characters? Of having them being so unpleasant. I couldn't tell. There's a point of them acting so ugly but there was a limit to which I could endure this ugliness.
Imamura is one of the few directors with two Golden Palm winners, I liked "The Eel" a bit more but I thought the climax was misplaced, this time, I didn't enjoy "Nayarama" but I'm glad it reached its peak (literally) with the right scene. I'm looking forward to seeing the original but not with the same urge.