directed by Kenji Mizoguchi
Japan
97 minutes
4.5 stars out of 5
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At the beginning of this summer, I made a list of 10 films from across the history of Japanese cinema that I needed to see but hadn't yet - no specific criterion for inclusion, just ones that came to mind when I thought to myself "I can't believe I still haven't seen [x]". As happens often, ticking items off that list hasn't been going as quickly as I'd hoped, and Ugetsu is the first one I've actually managed to get to. But if you're going to pick one Japanese film to watch - for any reason, at any time, ever - you can absolutely, positively do a lot worse than picking Ugetsu.
I was vaguely familiar with the source material for this film because I had seen other versions of it, one of which is a favorite of mine (The Bride from Hades, with Kōjirō Hongō's excellent performance) and the other of which (Hellish Love) served to highlight how good the first one was in comparison. But when contrasted with Ugetsu, both of them feel extremely stripped-down. They both focus on only one story - of the man who becomes infatuated with a ghost woman and either explicitly has sex with and marries her or is implied to - whereas Ugetsu, despite itself clarifying that it is a "new refashioning" of the source in its own preamble, situates that story within a more broadly developed world and uses it to convey a much clearer message.
The first thing that stuck out to me while I was watching this and the thing that is sticking with me now, the morning after, is the way the movie is framed. Most of the scenes are shot so that we can see the actors head-to-toe, moving through their environment in a way that conveys on an instinctual level that they are part of the scenery, part of their world, not part of ours. There's also something about the way the actors live out their characters' lives that feels private and almost uncomfortably intimate. It feels like we are (or at least I felt like I was) not being shown a story, the way we're so used to movies feeling; it's more like we're in the space with these people, but they aren't aware of us. Like the viewer is the ghost in the room, or in the village, or wherever. I was really struck by this method of showing the entirety of a person whenever they were in the frame, restricting headshots or other more closely focused framing to a minimum, and how effective it is at drawing the viewer into the scene. It's kind of incredible.
Oddly, something about the set-up for the film reminded me of The Hidden Fortress: we follow characters who are trying to live during wartime but are not themselves anybody special, and exist on the fringes of the action, only infrequently seeing it directly, but continually feeling its influence.
As has been pointed out, two worlds exist side-by-side in Ugetsu, the boundaries of which are often so thin as to be virtually nonexistent. When Genjuro slips out of his world of strife and hardship and into the perfumed, hallucinatory paradise of Lady Wakasa's mansion, there is a distinct line between where he had been previously and where he was now, but he's the only one who doesn't see it. The point of connection between the world of the living and the world Genjuro is briefly invited into is his own pottery - when he is served sake in his own wares, it feels like a very sudden and jarring reminder of who he is and where he comes from. There's nothing physically distinguishing the ghosts from living humans, but regardless, their entire presence gives off an almost "uncanny valley" effect in the middle of the sweaty, dirty world of trying to live and work and make money: they are too perfect, too beautiful; they don't belong here, which we know, because we're in on the secret, but Genjuro isn't. Machiko Kyo is really something else here; the way Lady Wakasa's every move feels so deliberately choreographed and practiced serves to add another layer of unreality to her physical presence.
I suppose the easiest takeaway here is that the film posits that we are inevitably doomed to suffer and any attempt to rise above this suffering will result in temporary pleasure at best and punishment at worst. By the end of the film, the only person who really seems to appreciate living is Miyagi, who has died, and can now only watch her husband and child from the same in-between space inhabited by the two ghost women. No one is happy, no one got what they wanted. The most they can hope for is that things would stay the same instead of actively getting worse. At least most of the character survive, but for what? It's a stunning, technically impressive, near-flawless film, but it is also, to use academic parlance, a huge bummer. Something I see a lot in reviews of this film is the claim that it carries a message about greed, but honestly, I didn't get that from it. What the characters experience doesn't even feel like the consequence of greed: it just feels like they're being punished for daring to imagine what it's like to live beyond a subsistence level.
There's not much I can say about this movie that hasn't already been said in a more incisive and intelligent way - to that end I really do want to read some actual essays about this film, it's that good - so I guess as a closing note I'll mention a specific scene that I loved. This movie has one of the creepiest scenes I've ever watched in anything that isn't traditionally considered a "horror movie": when Lady Wakasa is dancing as she and Genjuro are undertaking marriage ceremonies, we begin to hear a deeper voice accompanying her singing, a man's voice; at first, I assumed this was diegetic, since there is chanting elsewhere on the soundtrack - but then the camera slowly pans to the mask belonging to Lady Wakasa's deceased father, and we realize that we're hearing his ghost, and so are the characters.