| Onibaba is one of
my all time favorite Japanese films of all
time, the film, a psychodrama with some mild
horror elements, like, say, Herk Harvey’s
Carnival of Souls is a work with highly
minimalist resources taken to a cinematic
level few massive budget films even achieve.
Directed by maverick Kaneto Shindo, a fine
leftist indie filmmaker who also made the
harrowing The Naked Island, the film
was shot with a tiny cast in a real rural
area of Japan. The results are simply stunning
and the film is an intensely rich one. The
cinematography is beautiful and the plot is
deep food for thought. It, along with such
films as Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Woman
in the Dunes and Toshio Matsumoto’s
Funeral Parade of Roses, is a fine
example of the burning creativity that was
going on largely outside of the Japanese studio
system in the very studio-run 1960s.
The film's plot is simple.
Sometime in the Warring States period of Japanese
history, two unnamed women, one middle aged
(Nobuko Otawa), the other young (Jitsuko Yoshimura)
survive on a "kill-to-live" basis.
They live in a field, once farmed by the woman's
son and the girl's husband, now overgrown
and turned into a sea of reeds, which they
lure fleeing samurai into. The samurai are
then killed by the women, who strip them of
their armor, toss their bodies into a stinking
pit and then exchange the armor for food.
This works for a while, but one day Hachi
(Kei Sato), the son's friend, returns from
the war, saying that the women's son/husband
was killed. It’s not long before he
starts to romance the girl, which infuriates
her mother-in-law. One day, the older woman
meets a disfigured samurai warrior wearing
a hideous mask. She lures him into the pit
and takes the mask, which she then uses to
frighten her daughter-in-law. One rainy night,
however, the mask sticks to her face.
Onibaba embodies everything
I love about Japanese cinema. Featuring only
three prominent characters, two of whom don’t
even have names and set entirely in a field
filled with swaying reeds, it’s a shining
example of how one requires few resources
save for tenacity to make a brilliant film.
The cinematography by Kiyomi Kuroda, who worked
with Shindo for many years from The Naked
Island on, is some of the most gorgeous
monochrome cinematography ever lensed. Everything
in the film is filmed in stark, high contrast
black and white Tohoscope and its images,
from the haunting backdrop of the film’s
swaying reeds to the horrifying, grinning
visage of the Japanese hanya Noh mask to the
skull filled, cavernous bottom of the pit
in which the women dispose of the bodies of
their victims, are filled with an indelible
power that burns into your mind nearly as
strongly as they are burned onto their film
stock. The film features some for the time
very daring nudity and sexuality which resulted
in it being censored the world over, even
in Japan, where a second’s glimpse of
pubic hair, still largely forbidden in Japanese
media, caused many ruffled feathers at Eirin,
Japan’s board of film censors.
The music by Hikaru Hayashi,
another frequent Kaneto Shindo collaborator,
is very effective, with an almost violent
and hysterical sound that perfectly suits
its "dog-eat-dog" setting of medieval
near-anarchy. Even more effective is the sound
mix by Tetsuya Ohashi that is almost as effective,
eerie and atmospheric as the film's visuals.
If one listens closely before most of the
more intense scenes, such as where a character
screams, you can hear a quieter version of
the sound sort of "reverse echo"
starting a second before it actually starts.
This is a nicely unsettling effect that adds
a slight level of 'anticipation' to the scares
on hand here.
The script is phenomenal and,
as usual with Shindo, highly politically charged.
The film delves into the desperate measures
wartime and equally desperate circumstances
create even with so-called average people
with the two otherwise normal women, robbed
of their farming livelihood due to the loss
of their son/husband to war, who must resort
to a life of murder to even stay alive. This
is a particularly relevant message for the
audiences of Japan, who less than two decades
prior saw similar circumstances arise for
many thanks to their involvement in World
War II. Shindo’s almost equally impressive
later film Kuroneko (1968) would meld
a similar theme with a much stronger horror
element. With their stark black and white
visual schemes, brutal medieval settings and
deeply existentialist themes, Onibaba and
Kuroneko are very reminiscent of an
Eastern equivalent to Ingmar Bergman’s
“medieval Sweden” films like The
Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring.
In Onibaba, the characters are well
portrayed, particularly by Shindo’s
wife Nobuko Otowa as the older woman. She
truly plays her as a scheming, conniving,
narcissistic and highly manipulative individual
and her final fate, while viscerally horrifying,
is strangely satisfying as well. Fine character
actor Kei Sato (a common face in the films
of both Shindo and Masaki Kobayashi) also
shines as the lecherous Hachi. The character
arc is well handled, as the older woman and
her daughter-in-law are at first very closely-knit
but their relationship deteriorates quickly
into a massive passive-aggressive power struggle
driven as much by the old woman’s fear
of annihilation (if the girl abandons her
for Hachi she will not be able to survive
any longer) as by her jealously over their
relationship and sexual frustration. All these
emotions culminate in the film’s gut-punch
finale which is where the film becomes, if
only mildly, a horror film.
Overall, Onibaba is
absolutely one of my very favorite films to
come from the nation of Japan, its virtues
are so vast in number and it is so very thematically
and cinematically rich that it comes with
only the highest recommendation from me. It’s
a shame, though, that more of Shindo’s
films are not available on DVD even in Japan.
Shindo, interestingly enough, is almost a
century old now and still very much alive
and working on films. Now there’s a
true filmmaker if I ever saw one.
|
(5/5)