The Ballad of Narayama; Black Rain

This pair of Cannes Film Festival award winning films share Japanese director Shohei Imamura's poetic attention to shot composition but, in most other respects, are as different as night and day. The Ballad of Narayama opens with a panoramic view of snow-covered mountains, eventually zooming in on a Japanese village of 100 years ago. The idyllic mood is quickly shattered when Risuke (who is called "The Stinker" due to his prodigious bad breath--possibly due to a gastronomic fondness for tree grub) discovers a frozen baby in his rice paddy. Risuke goes from one household to the next asking, essentially, who was the litterbug? Infant exposure is one of the prime means of population control. The film skillfully careens back and forth between morbid comedy and poignant drama, as it comes to focus on the story of Risuke's mother Orin (luminously played by Sumiko Sakamoto). At 69, Orin has nearly reached the honored status of septuagenarian, which means that she will be able to travel to Mount Narayama to join the gods. During this final season of her life, Orin labors to put her household in order: finding a new wife for her widowed eldest son Tatsuhei (Ken Ogata), and sweet-talking the village women to please take pity on her son Risuke, who is still a virgin (not counting the neighbor's dog). Although some will be offended by the graphic portrait of peasant life one millennia ago, Imamura's cross-cutting between the sex, violence, and instinct for survival of the villagers, on the one hand, and the numerous scenes of nature red in tooth and claw (animals mate and devour one another throughout), on the other, underscores--in a not necessarily critical way--the similarities between man and nature. During the final reel, the sensitive Tatsuhei must carry his mother to the summit of the mountain, and bid farewell in a deeply moving scene which overrides the brutality and insensitivity of all that has gone before. A powerful cinematic experience. Black Rain, which is shot in black and white, is altogether different, telling the story of a family of survivors from the Hiroshima bombing of 1945. Opening with a truly hellish vision of the explosion and its immediate aftermath (a seared and writhing mass of disfigured humanity stumbling blindly through the burning rubble of Hiroshima), the film flashes forward to 1950, when Yasuko (Yoshiko Tanaka), who lives with her well-off aunt and uncle, is trying to find a marriage partner. The uncle's attempts to employ a matchmaker and obtain a certificate of health for Yasuko from the local doctor, as well as the aunt's desperate hiring of a mystic, are in vain, as one suitor after another backs out of the marriage arrangement because Yasuko, though not in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing, was exposed to the black rain (the radioactive fallout). As friends of the family fall victim to the radiation sickness, Yasuko and her guardians gradually realize that for them too, it is only a matter of time. Black Rain is a horrifying reminder of the wide-reaching tragedy of nuclear warfare. We've all seen the mind-numbing newsreels of Hiroshima on August 6, 1945; this film tells us about the continuing effects of the split-second event...the quiet deaths of survivors who initially escaped but carried the time-delayed seed of destruction in their bodies. Both The Ballad of Narayama and Black Rain are prime Imamura and sterling examples of modern Japanese cinema. Both of these letterboxed and nicely subtitled films are highly recommended. (R. Pitman) [DVD Review—June 10, 2008—AnimEigo, 130 min., in Japanese w/English subtitles, not rated, $24.98—Making its first appearance on DVD, 1983's The Ballad of Narayama features a nice transfer and DVD extras including program notes, an image gallery, and trailers. Bottom line: a small extras package for a modern classic.] [DVD Review—Oct. 13, 2009—AnimEigo, 123 min., in Japanese w/English subtitles, not rated, $24.98—Making its latest appearance on DVD, 1989's Black Rain sports a nice transfer. DVD extras include an alternate color ending (19 min.), an interview with assistant director Takashi Miike (8 min.), an interview with actress Yoshiko Tanaka (7 min.), a 'Multimedia Vault' (with WWII-era archival films and images), program notes, cast and crew bios, an image gallery, and trailers. Bottom line: a fine extras package for a powerful film.]