‘The Ballad of Narayama’ or — ‘Logan’s Run’ Meets Chris Morris’ ‘Jam’?!
(contains potentially disturbing imagery)
There is a tiny village on a remote Japanese mountainside. Isolated and impoverished the village has harsh rules to ensure its survival and one of the most important of these rules is that when someone reaches 70 years old they must climb to the top of Narayama mountain and allow themselves to die. This is the case of the grandmother of a family living in the village — she is about to turn 70 and must put her affairs in order before ascending to the summit and her death.
So it’s a sort of 19th Century Japanese version of ‘Logan’s Run’ (1976) where voluntary euthanasia is enforced to prevent overpopulation. Food is scarce meaning, especially in winter, the less mouths to feed the better. So without complaining the grandmother prepares for her death, primarily by marrying off her errant sons, with varying degrees of success and making sure the family will continue. The old shall make way for the young.
Yet there is more to this grandmother’s acceptance of her sacrifice than knowing her family won’t starve. It is also because it is a law of the village and these laws have been created because human beings are animals with deep, dark passions which need contained. If they can be contained which, looking at what madness goes on in this village, doesn’t seem to be the case.
‘Shohei Imamura’s ‘The Ballad of Narayama’ (1983) deals very much with the tension between nature and human laws, constantly flipping the question as to which might be the more destructive like some sort of existential burger or pancake. We see the consequences of both law and nature — a dead baby discarded in a field; the tale of an old man beating a boy to death for fucking his dog; a man shrouded in a constant stink who gets tricked out of his turn of legally fucking the village widow because of a suspicious loophole involving a butterfly. Life is brutal but the consequences of keeping that brutality at bay can be even more horrifying, no better illustrated than during the film’s most shocking (well, one of the most shocking as that term’s kinda relative here) sequences with the elimination of an entire family. I mention all this because ‘The Ballad of Narayama’ flinches away from nothing and is not an easy watch, but dear god is it a rewarding one.
As usual though for Imamura what’s really shocking is how ridiculously funny this all is. The aforementioned dead baby is appalling to behold but it is also a joke, an incredible dark and funny one, but a joke nonetheless. The stinking man, denied sexual intimacy, seeks out the village dog. It’s not absurdism Imamura’s dealing with here but the fact that it’s futile for humans to deny both external and internal nature. For example, there’s a gorgeously shot moment against a snowy mountainside where a villager shoots and kills a hare… only for an eagle to immediately swoop down and steal it away. It’s just one of those things that happens which is why there is hardly any judgement going on in his films.
It is the juxtaposition of glorious cinematography followed or preceded by a gut-punch gag which seems to be distinct to Imamura’s style. He shoots like Herzog or Malick, following human beings amongst nature but then pulls the rug out from our feet with a piece of craziness no other director would dare to contemplate. The contrasts are fearless and extreme, as though Bertolucci had suddenly decided to start shooting an episode of the TV show ‘Bottom’ in the middle of an epic.
The final chapter involves the eldest son carrying his mother on his back up the mountain to her death. They have both been prepared by the elders in the rules of the ceremony, one of the most important being they must not speak on their journey. And so they wordlessly ascend and we observe them, the son struggling through the foliage and mud with his fragile burden on his back which he is determined not to drop, as though we were watching ‘Fitzcaraldo’ (1982) or ‘The Wages of Fear’ (1953) but the cargo is a little old woman.
It is also here that a significant shift occurs as the film, suddenly, plunges into the realm of the metaphorical. This allows Imamura to keep shooting in his naturalist style but to also exist in the domain of the purely psychological with the perfect balance of the believable and the fantastical starting to blend. The ascent becomes as much the son’s internal journey as it is his mother’s physical and representative of the climb we must all go through in order to let someone go.
Which brings us to one last rule and one which might be best to be strictly obeyed as it highlights why this bizarre ritual is important — the fact we must all, one day, let go. And the consequences for breaking this rule? Well, I don’t want to spoil anything but ‘The Ballad of Narayama’ whips out one last joke and it’s is, without a doubt, one of the most violent, brutal, shocking, earth-shattering gags I’ve ever witness end a movie. It’s as violent in its speed and surface flippancy as it is in its physical destruction but these few, gob-smacking seconds might just be the meaning of the entire movie — i.e. let go… or else — as well as one of the funniest jokes ever put to film. It is an overwhelming, and hilarious, moment in cinema and I’m still shaking my head in disbelief at the following morning.
‘The Ballad of Narayama’ is, as with nearly all Imamura films, a stunning and remarkable piece of work of which there is no other filmmaker I can compare him to. His films grab you by the throat and never let go with a combination of unflinching honesty, poetic beauty, pitch-black comedy and shocking violence. His films are cathartic, moving, exhausting and fearsomely energising.
The view of Imamura is that he is an anthropological filmmaker, meaning he observes his actors and characters in the same way he would an insect, bird or reptile. Yet there is a moment during ‘Narayama’ where we watch an owl observe a couple make love and we realise that we are watching this love-making from the owl’s point of view. Maybe that’s the real invitation we are being offered here? To view things from the creature’s point of view. That we are not human beings viewing animals but we are animals observing human beings and all the silly, stupid and crazy things they get up to.
