Sansho the Bailiff
Starring: Kinuyo Tanaka, Yoshiaki Hanayagi, Kyoko Kagawa
Director: Kenji Mizoguchi
The film: Although less well known outside Japan today than his contemporaries Akira Kurosawa and Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi was for a time the more successful of the three on the world stage. He won the Silver Lion at the prestigious Venice Film Festival in three consecutive years with The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953) and Sansho the Bailiff (1954), but after his death in 1956 fell off the global radar. Recently, however, he has been making something of a comeback, largely thanks to the Criterion Collection, which released Ugetsu in a comprehensive DVD package last year, and this month delivers the equally remarkable Sansho the Bailiff in a similar package.
Based on a short story by Ogai Mori, which was in turn based on a centuries-old folktale, Sansho the Bailiff is set in the late Heian period (794-1185), a time when, according to the film's opening, 'mankind had not yet awakened as human beings', and slavery wasn't uncommon.
The film opens with a flashback of a provincial governor being sent into exile for his liberal views, then moves forward to his wife (Mizoguchi regular and muse Kinuyo Tanaka), son Zushio and daughter Anju travelling on foot to meet him some years later. Along the way, the children are abducted and sold into slavery while the wife is carried off to a distant island to serve as courtesan to an evil nobleman.