'Sansho The Bailiff' & 'The Story Of The Last Chrysanthemums'

Even when Japanese filmmakers of the 1950s and 1960s weren't directly ripping off Shakespeare, they always seemed to mirror stories and plots from the the Bard (who stole all of his stories from the Greeks).

This isn't a criticism. In fact, I'd like to know more. Why does it feel that almost every noted film from Japan from this era seem to follow very consistent patterns in storytelling? Because they all do.

In Sansho the Bailiff, a governmental representative and his family are banished to an outlying land. Eventually, the children and mother are kidnapped and solid into slavery and prostitution, the children wind up at the camp of Sansho, a miserable, and violent steward of the camp, who brands the slaves if they try to escape.

Under the guise of taking a sick prisoner to the wilderness to die, the brother and sister hatch a plan of escape. The brother goes with the sick prisoner and the sister ends up drowning herself to prevent torture. The brother makes it to a monastery and eventually to a local governor, where he proves his identity, and due to his relation to his well-regarded father, is given his own governorship. From rags to riches.

As governor, he arrests Sansho and frees the slaves. He learns that his sister committed suicide and he begins a search for his mother, who he finds living on a beach, old and blind. There he learns his father is dead. And that's where it ends. It's so entirely Shakespeare that its a wonder the guy didn't write himself 400 years ago.

These two are films from Kenji Mizoguchi, one of the masters of Japanese filmmaking. He died at the relatively young age of 58 of luekemia. His work spanned from film's infancy in the 1920s to the 1950s, when Sansho the Bailiff was completed just a few years before he died.

If nothing else, Mizoguchi was regarded as one of the first and great feminist directors. I don't know if Mizoguchi intentionally directed female characters to be how they were, or if it merely happened the way it happened. To me, a feminist director is exacting and does things on purpose to espouse a certain message. I never got that his "feminism" was forced into the film as a sort of message.

Certainly, in The Story of the Last Chrysanthemums, the female lead is the hero of the film, the voice of reason and encouragement as the male characters tend to rely on self-doubt and the destruction of relationships. Certainly in Sansho the Bailiff, the male lead is the "hero" in that he exacts the revenge and rights the wrong. But it is the bravery of the sister -- calmly, methodically drowning herself in order to not be a liability and also resisting the power of Sansho -- that keys the film's latter half.