The infamous Balad of Narayama. It's one of those movies that's highly regarded, I start to watch it, then I quickly lose my train of thought without having gotten an inkling of its content or meaning. This process continues until years later I finally bunker in and watch it.
Well, I finished it and I discovered that it's essentially an exploitation film and it's no less grotesque than Ebola Syndrome (1996) or something like Drillbit Taylor (2008); although the latter of these two was pretty vanilla due to the US' infamous PG-13 syndrome, where most Hollywood movies need to fit neatly into a PG-13 rating in order to secure as wide a release as possible.
So, as you can guess from the rating, the exploitative themes and elements in this movie are justified in the end. That is to say, the ends justify the means, for this movie brings an important message about privation and the forgotten benefits of living in societies of plenty in the modern era.
The film reflects this by considering the privation of two main resources - sex (access to women for sex) and food - and it uses a multi-generational family in a bleak agricultural mountain Japanese village to tell it.
On the one hand, because food resources are so scarce, those found hoarding or stealing food are brutally executed by the village. Likewise, when people are too old to be good producers, they are dumped at the summit of a mountain to stop draining the resources of the families.
The disparity between the sexual haves and have-nots is also pronounced. The coarse low-status farmhands who can't marry, pay, or seduce women regularly must resort to all sorts of depravities and live in pathetic frustration, getting by as they can. And the film relishes in showing all of this in graphic detail.
To drive all of this home, the film is interspersed with grotesque images of animals doing unsightly things - copulating, consuming each other, or giving birth. And it's not the cute cuddly animals, either.
So what is the difference between this and any typical exploitation movie? Well, for one, the acting is top-notch. Secondly, there film has a good deal of integrity. This world of scarcity is well-developed, the social strata are skillfully defined, and things proceed according to the world's well-developed rules. It's a meticulously constructed film. And let's not forget the cinematography. A dark winter in a remote mountain village and you never forget where you are, whether indoors or outdoors.
But perhaps above all this is the message. You watch this and you're glad to live in a society of plenty. You watch this ugly, dare I say GROSS, work of art and it gets you thinking. Just a historical stone's throw away from that. This is humanity stripped of another layer of decency and social order. Fascinating and thought-provoking.
Too complicated, at times even inscrutable, to be one of the greatest, this is nevertheless a potent player among film.
Honourable Mentions: Scindler's List (1993). Also tried to make a high-art exploitation film. It didn't accomplish that so skillfully as this film did, though.
Well, I finished it and I discovered that it's essentially an exploitation film and it's no less grotesque than Ebola Syndrome (1996) or something like Drillbit Taylor (2008); although the latter of these two was pretty vanilla due to the US' infamous PG-13 syndrome, where most Hollywood movies need to fit neatly into a PG-13 rating in order to secure as wide a release as possible.
So, as you can guess from the rating, the exploitative themes and elements in this movie are justified in the end. That is to say, the ends justify the means, for this movie brings an important message about privation and the forgotten benefits of living in societies of plenty in the modern era.
The film reflects this by considering the privation of two main resources - sex (access to women for sex) and food - and it uses a multi-generational family in a bleak agricultural mountain Japanese village to tell it.
On the one hand, because food resources are so scarce, those found hoarding or stealing food are brutally executed by the village. Likewise, when people are too old to be good producers, they are dumped at the summit of a mountain to stop draining the resources of the families.
The disparity between the sexual haves and have-nots is also pronounced. The coarse low-status farmhands who can't marry, pay, or seduce women regularly must resort to all sorts of depravities and live in pathetic frustration, getting by as they can. And the film relishes in showing all of this in graphic detail.
To drive all of this home, the film is interspersed with grotesque images of animals doing unsightly things - copulating, consuming each other, or giving birth. And it's not the cute cuddly animals, either.
So what is the difference between this and any typical exploitation movie? Well, for one, the acting is top-notch. Secondly, there film has a good deal of integrity. This world of scarcity is well-developed, the social strata are skillfully defined, and things proceed according to the world's well-developed rules. It's a meticulously constructed film. And let's not forget the cinematography. A dark winter in a remote mountain village and you never forget where you are, whether indoors or outdoors.
But perhaps above all this is the message. You watch this and you're glad to live in a society of plenty. You watch this ugly, dare I say GROSS, work of art and it gets you thinking. Just a historical stone's throw away from that. This is humanity stripped of another layer of decency and social order. Fascinating and thought-provoking.
Too complicated, at times even inscrutable, to be one of the greatest, this is nevertheless a potent player among film.
Honourable Mentions: Scindler's List (1993). Also tried to make a high-art exploitation film. It didn't accomplish that so skillfully as this film did, though.