Sanshō the Bailiff (1954)

directed by Kenji Mizoguchi

Japan

124 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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Now we come to the second Mizoguchi film on the "summer of classic Japanese cinema" watchlist that I created for myself. Much like Ugetsu, Sanshō the Bailiff is concerned with the human condition, but where Ugetsu has its characters unable to escape the prison of bodily existence except in their fleeting, ephemeral dreams, the main character in Sanshō quite literally rolls up his sleeves and does something about it. (A feel-good movie this is not, however.)

The first forty minutes of the film follow the family of a former nobleman who was cast into exile after getting into arguments with too many influential military men. Although he was in a position of power, this was a truly good man; he impressed upon his son the importance of always having mercy, no matter what. After his exile, his wife Tamaki (Kinuyo Tanaka) and two children (Masahiko Tsugawa and Keiko Enami as young Zushio and Anju respectively, Yoshiaki Hanagi and Kyōko Kagawa as their adult versions) begin journeying to find him, but they are taken advantage of on the road by an old woman who shelters them to earn their trust and then tricks Tamaki into being separated from Zushio and Anju while the children are forced into slavery.

Something that I feel the need to note here is that the film is titled after a character who is barely a part of it. One could argue (probably correctly) that Sanshō the Bailiff actually is the driving force of the film, being the man who ruled the enslaved workers on his estate with an iron fist and therefore compelling Zushio to rise up against him and tear down the institution of slavery that he benefited from. But we hardly ever see Sanshō, really. The main character is Zushio. However, naming a film after the driving antagonistic force - whether human or monster - is not at all unusual. Count Dracula is not technically the main character in Bram Stoker's book, but it is still titled Dracula, because the story is inherently about him. It's the same with Sanshō the Bailiff: Sanshō may feel like a relatively unimportant character, but he represents the whole rotten system that Zushio rebels against. As I've seen pointed out, Sanshō is vile because he is not unique - he's just one of many.

The story of Sanshō is personal, but the broader picture is political. It's one of those movies where you can identify messages that are still incredibly relevant to our own times; perhaps this is, like Ugetsu with its emphasis on the eternal misery of living in the flesh, a statement about the perennial nature of human cruelty. But - crucially - it also posits that we do have the power to change our circumstances and the circumstances of everyone around us. When the film is concerning itself with Zushio's attempts to seize power and wield it, not for his own gain, but to erase the damage done by evil men who had previously held it, it feels like nothing so much as a tendency film - those left-leaning pictures made in the earlier half of the 20th century that criticized a tendency that the author felt was present in (and detrimental to) society. I felt this every time one of the characters would remark on how the people in power reduce them to something less than human. It is true now as it mostly always has been that those in the highest positions lose sight of anything not directly relevant to them - even the minister who endows Zushio with the office that eventually enables him to ban slavery from his territories, a seemingly gentle man, only becomes involved with Zushio after he realizes that their families were connected in some way.

Zushio becomes the mythical "good" ruler: the very idealized philosopher-king who rises to power only long enough to utilize it to liberate as many people as he can from suffering, and then relinquishes it before it can begin to corrupt him. This is a perfect example of the kind of thing that critics like Donald Richie tend to see as overtly leftist propaganda - again, there are so many moments when this reads as a tendency film - and that may be so. But, my god, living in America in 2025, I just want to see someone do something good.

In the final shot, the camera pans up and up and up as Zushio and Tamaki embrace - our part in the story is over for now, but the final shot - the sea and the trees, a small human in the foreground going about his work of drying seaweed - feels like it's reminding us that Zushio's story is the story of human life, of the entire world. I think about that shot in parallel with the shot of Anju's death - the ripples on the surface of the water conveying the transience of life, and then the expansive final frame that situates us in the world as a whole, constituting a part of it but not all of it. As I said, although Zushio's journey is inherently political, at the end of the film, he is just a man, just a living creature, choosing mercy, defying cruelty, and that's the most important thing about him.