Saw this one tonight. Like other mythic tales / fairy tales / legends / parables, it left me chewing, pondering.

So I'd love to have more to chew and ponder. I know the film has admirers here - otherwise it wouldn't have place on last year's A&F 100, for example. What do you love about the film?

Okay, after a night of pondering, and a bit of reading...

UGETSU ("UGETSU MONOGATARI," 1953, Japan, Kenji Mizoguchi, Yoshikata Yoda screenplay, Matsutaro Kawaguchi adaptation of stories by Akinari Ueda and Maupassant)

Coming home a bit baffled after viewing this rather alien (even alienating) film, I was relieved to open my copy of "The New York Times Guide To The Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made" and find that, for all their respect (evident in the movie's selection for the book), reviewer Bosley Crowther was similarly, shall we say, guarded in his reaction, commenting on its "strangely obscure, inferential, almost studiedly perplexing quality" that he judged would be "hard for even the most attentive patron to grasp as it goes along" – "vexing," a "weird, exotic stew."

The performances are for the most part stagey, with the kind of physical and emotional exaggeration seen in traditional Japanese theatre. The moral lessons seem baldly obvious even in the opening scenes, when two men – brothers, apparently – ignore their sensible wives and, cartoonlike, risk everything in the midst of a brutal civil war, one to grow unnecessarily wealthy by selling his pottery, the other desperate to leave behind his miserable life of poverty by becoming an acclaimed samurai. You know instantly that they are fools, that the women are right, and that it's all going to end badly: in this sense it has the blunt straightforwardness of a morality play, a fable, or one of Bertoldt Brecht's preachier scolds. (Again I cling to Mr Crowther for moral support as I expess qualms about what has become, more than fifty years after the fact, a pretty much universally certified Classic Of The Cinema: remarking on the "averageness of the stories," the central characters "stock" and "the lessons proved banal." Whew.)

One of the film's celebrated strengths is its visual beauty, particularly its sustained sequence shots featuring a lithely mobile camera. I'll willingly accept this as a personal aesthetic blind spot, but must admit I didn't respond to the film's purported beauty the way I do to, say, Tarkovsky's similarly lauded sequence shots or Bresson's sense of composition.

But there are unexpected subtleties. When the potter is seduced by an exotic and wealthy woman in the city where he goes to sell his wares, the intoxication has as much to do with her elaborate praise of his pottery (which we have seen him create in almost slapdash haste, driven not by artistry but by a feverish lust for profit) as her otherworldly beauty (which puts him under a sort of spell the moment she appears). Whether or not this bizarre-looking creature was actually appealing to the film's original audience, the lack of appeal a mondern western audience might find to her unappealingly stylized white face certainly underlines the madness, the irrationality of his sudden attraction to this woman who is not his wife. He's "crazy in love," he's "mad about her," he's "bewitched," seized with a similar compulsive desire that drove his scheme to take advantage of the war's chaos to become wealthy off his pottery, and there's something archetypally true about that: true about infatuation, true about desire, true about adultery.

It's also intriguing to see the way both the character's and the audience's perception of the pottery (and the process of its creation) shifts over the course of the film. From the mercenary profit-driven frenzy of the opening act to the contemplative, mindful activity of the closing, there is a real transformation, part of what lends the film its distinctly spiritual impact – quite apart from the more obviously supernatural elements. Or is this transformation apart from those elements at all? While it may be fired in the kiln of his encounter with what we might think of as the second of the film's "ghost women," isn't it cast on the wheel of the first? Give the film time, and there are eventual subtleties and complexities to be found on reflection, confounding its apparently blatant moralizing. (It's not the morality I object to, by the way, it's the moralizing – just as one can embrace sentiment while despising a story that sentimentalizes.)

I attended this film with a friend who has a lifelong fascination with myth and fairy tale: I imagine a dog-eared copy of Bruno Bettelheim's "The Uses Of Enchantment" lying by his bed with his Bible, its underlined pages held together with a rubber band. As "End" appeared on the screen and and I breathed a sigh of relief that I had endured the duration, he breathed something that caught me by surprise: "Wow." UGETSU stirred him, it spoke into his life in what seems to me a clearly spiritual, even uncannily supernatural way. The sequence where the central character is drawn aside for a warning we do not hear, the strange black writing that appears on his back and its effect on his condition, the relief we experience at the outcome and then the deft way that that resolution is re-resolved – these are not only some of the film's most sublime artistic and thematic accomplishments, but also (at least for my friend, and I suspect for many others, and increasingly for me) another source of its undeniable – if elusive and confounding – spiritual effect.

Commentators remark that this film is a particularly clear expression of the director's conversion to Buddhism, so it shouldn't surprise us if its spiritual (and aesthetic) qualities arise from the same sort of mystery and tension of opposites that mark a Zen koan. Bosley Crowther closes his review by remarking that Ugetsu means "pale and mysterious moon after the rain – which is just about as revealing as a great deal else in this film." I find it fascinating that the same film that is critiqued for the banality of the lessons it offers is chided for its obscurity – I would say that Mr Crowther was talking out of both sides of his mouth, except that I had exactly the same experience. And I find it remarkable (and significant) that so confounding a film would also offer such clarity and illumination to my friend.

Isn't that just the way, sometimes?

SANSHO THE BAILIFF

It's been a *long* time since I saw Ugetsu (and I loved it!), but FWIW...

Re. the "white face," etc. - that's still standard for the women of the Japanese imperial family at certain functions. The dress and overall appearance date back to the Heian period. (Here's a page that might also be of interest re. the film and costuming - this is *the* Heian kimono/formal dress for women.) I can't recall if the women had their teeth blackened - if so, that's also something that dates back to the Heian period, as is the makeup and stylization of facial features. You're right, I think, to make a correlation between Japanese theater (Noh and kabuki) and a lot of things that happen in the film.

Some of the other things about the woman (her [spoiler]being a fox spirit, with all that entails[/spoiler]) are very deeply rooted in Japanese culture and folklore - you can read something about them here for starters. (Kurosawa used them in the 1st sequence of his "Dreams," too, but portrayed them differently.)

A Japanese audience is understandably going to pick up on all kinds of cultural cues in "Ugetsu" that we never will... me included. I'd love to learn more about this film - and others like it - from people who are comfortable in both cultures. After talking to an Asian student, i realized that I'd missed some of the main points in Ang Lee's "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," because I've had minimal exposure to Chinese culture. How mch more so in this case!

Edit: this "misconceptions" page is also very helpful - http://academia.issendai.com/fox-misconceptions.shtml

* And check this out: Ugestsu Monogatari: Tales of Moonlight and Rain - the film is an adaption a couple of the stories here. (Written by Ueda Akinari.)

Edit edit: Missed your citation of this title - sorry! I didn't know about this book 'til today, and from everything I've read, it's a classic. I wonder how the film was received in Japan when it 1st came out?

Nah - I was just citing Bosley citing the translation of the title. It does look like an interesting book, though. It would also be interesting to read the Maupassant story that apparently also informed the screenplay.

You're right about the cultural "givens" that we from other cultures simply don't pick up. Sometimes it seems a marvel that films from such different worlds speak to us at all! Yet they surely do, time and again.

Re: cultural differences, a note from my blog post on the Japanese films I have seen recently (including this one, though the film I am referring to specifically in this paragraph is Kurosawa's Rhapsody in August):

In fact, I found myself distracted by the composition of the images, and the way the characters run from the right side of the screen to the left in that final sequence (and in the video cover). Lately I have been thinking that, just as foreign dialogue needs subtitles, perhaps the visuals in movies from certain cultures should be flipped around, too. We English speakers are used to reading from the left to the right, so we "identify" with the left side of the screen in a way that we do not "identify" with the right side (have you ever noticed how the "good guys" in all those battle scenes typically rush in from the left side of the screen?). But the Japanese read from right to left (or at least, they used to), so presumably they arrange the elements within their frames in a manner that is precisely the opposite of what we would do.

This sort of thing becomes very apparent to me when I see the elderly couple in Ozu's Tokyo Story sitting in tranquility and looking out the window, which is on the left side of the screen; or when I see a boy walking through a forest with a girl in Rhapsody in August, and he suddenly points to the left side of the screen and says "Look!"; and so on.

And to bring this back to the film that is the topic of this thread, there is a scene in Ugetsu where a man is on the right side of the screen -- the side that the Japanese would "identify" with -- as he addresses the creepy women, and the film cuts to a different shot which puts the women on the right side of the frame just before the women respond to the man.

There are probably lots of other scenes that one could point to. But I find it IS something that I notice more and more these days -- that I find myself trying to "translate" the visuals, or the impact of the visuals, as I watch films from certain Asian cultures.

do you know which Maupassant story he used? I've not run across specific references to it or to the titles of stories he adapted from Akinari's book, either.

I don't. There's this reference at reel.com; "Adapted loosely from a collection of ghost stories written by 18th-century author Akinari Ueda (as well as a short story by Guy de Maupassant)." But that's not much help. If there's anything else in my notes, I'll let you know.

In the Criterion DVD -- the story is in the booklet -- It's called The Legion of Honor, in it a man obsessed with winning the decoration of the title suffers his wife's affair with a government official, who is instrumental in getting him the coveted award.

But Ron...have you seen Sansho the Bailiff yet???

I didn't! UGETSU was first and SANSHO second on the double bill, and it was just one of those times where the first movie left both my buddy and me with enough to chew on, it didn't seem like staying for SANSHO would do it justice. But that one's rentable from my fabulous local dvd store, and I've got a nice big screen, so...

Enlightenment postponed!

Ron

Sansho's available on DVD?