Elders

Filial devotion. Teiji Takahashi and Kinuyo Tanaka

The 1958 Ballad of Narayama is a strangely wrought miracle in Kinoshita’s directorial career, and it’s his one unassailable masterpiece. Filmed almost entirely on brilliantly designed soundstages against mattes glazed in saturated color, this elegy on the transience of life genuinely shakes you. It makes you confront feelings about your parents that most of us push far down beneath the surface of propriety. Narayama, a lambent work of humanism, is almost unbearably moving. The acts of petty meanness build into scenes of barbaric cruelty, particularly the Amaya episode and the slaughter of Mata (Seiji Miyaguchi) in the final moments.

The film is uncannily beautiful, a moral work of art, and a transcendent vision of filial love. It’s also one of the greatest movie allegories of mortality: how the all-too-briefness of life exacerbates our miseries and poisons our attempts at kindness, which is life’s insuperable tragedy. As Orin, the old woman whose children are all too ready to abandon her to her terrible fate, Kinuyo Tanaka is the apotheosis of the Shakespearean clown: her wizened face framed by a dirty-blonde bob, she’s a miraculous mix of pitiable silliness and heartrending despair. Teiji Takahashi brings understated ambivalence to his role as Tatsuhei, Orin’s one decent offspring, and the two together give the rare movie impression of actual blood relations between actors.

The paradox is plain in Narayama (as it is in its thematic kin, King Lear): because of our brief, bookended lives, if we’re sane, we tell humane stories. This particular story was adapted from a 1956 novella Narayama bushiko (Ballad of Narayama) by Shichiro Fukazawa, and was remade in 1983 by Shohei Imamura in a grittier, naturalistic style. But there is no greater use of realism than in the final scene of Kinoshita’s version.