I’m a little puzzled about Kenji Mizoguchi’s Sansho the Bailiff. A much-anticipated viewing left me cold, and I wonder if it’s a reflection of the high expectations that always attend Films That Are Supposed To Be Good For You. (Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante was one of those, but I should probably watch it a second time.) Or perhaps it’s one of those films that make more sense after an accretion of various elements (life experience, “wisdom”, a more expanded filmic vocabulary), like L’Avventura, but I’m not sure about that either. It makes me wonder, then, about the film’s critical reception in the West upon its initial release, and whether its entry into the Canon had extra-cinematic reasons beyond my ken, but who am I to question this, really?

I recall reading a list compiled by Errol Morris in some magazine recently where he rather fatuously proclaims something to the effect that there were no such things as great movies, only great scenes. (The Thin Blue Line was a great movie however.) There are certainly a number of great scenes: the parallel crane shots that show the siblings gathering wood, the painful finale on a seaweed-strewn beach. (Foremost in my mind, though, is the scene when the indentured daughter, Anju, violently separated from her mother years before, hears a newly-arrived slave singing a song about Anju and her brother - singing her life with her words, essentially - and realizing it must have been learned from her long-missing mother, mourning for her children over the miles and years.) But I’m not convinced that Sansho the Bailiff is a great movie.

I think Mizoguchi’s much-vaunted “feminism” is perhaps lost in translation here, especially due to the passage of time. There may, of course, be something completely deliberate here on Mizoguchi’s part. The men in the film, when they’re not being malicious (and the titular character himself is only a slightly bigger honcho than others, but not by much), are merely ineffectual. The brother is shown to be capable of abusing his power once he starts working for Sansho, but then foolishly squanders that power when it comes to his family. The bailiff’s son is depicted as clearly possessing a sense of righteousness, and Mizoguchi sets him up as a potential savior and hero - only to have him literally walk out of the film. The governor (and father of Anju) is exiled precisely because he has shown too much compassion for the peasants of his prefecture - but chooses, even as he upholds his principles, to abandon his wife and children. Unlike the more stately Life of Oharu, where the dignified courtesan of the title faces her suffering with something that could even be called “empowerment”, the women characters of Sansho the Bailiff are grimly handed over to abuse and suicide. Perhaps Mizoguchi’s films should be called “female-centered” instead—centered, anyway, on the fates of women and the cruelty they receive at the hands of men.