Japan, the Middle Ages. Governor Masauji stands up for the rights of the exploited peasants, so his feudal lord punishes him by sending him to the Tsukushi Province in exile. On their long journey to him, Masauji's wife Tamaki and their children Zushio and Anju are tricked into boats of gangsters and separated. Zushio and his sister Anju land as slaves in the blacksmith estate run by cruel landlord Sansho, under the protection of the Minister of the Right. A decade later, the now grown up Anju persuades Zushio to escape with a sick old woman, while she stays behind and drowns herself in the lake. Zushio flees to Kyoto and begs the Chief Advisor for a meeting. The latter accepts to see Zushio and even grants him the job position of Governor of Tango, but informs him his father died. Zushio proclaims a law that abolishes slavery. Sansho's servants rip all the signs of the proclamation, so Zushio has him arrested and frees all the slaves. Hearing rumors his mother Tamaki was sold as a prostitute, Zushio travels to a village and finds her blind, but happy to meet him again.
Included in Roger Ebert's list of Great Movies, Kenji Mizoguchi's "Sansho the Bailiff" is very good, but still a little bit overrated to rightfully justify all the exaggerated superlatives by film critics. It's first two thirds are too slow and too conventional, sometimes even banal in its depictions of suffering, sadness and cruelty of slavery in Medieval Japan, yet it rises to the occasion in the fantastic last third when the story ignites, reaching the full spectrum of the viewing experience. The opening act shows a neat flashback: the scene of a grown up Zushio running towards his father dissolves into Zushio as a kid running towards the mansion, witnessing a rebellion. His noble father, a Governor, idealistically teaches him: "A man is not a human being without mercy. Even if you are hard on yourself, be merciful to others. Men are created equal. Everyone is entitled to his happiness." The following second act seems like a dark, bitter negation of all of this, when Zushio and his sister Anju are kidnapped and sold as slaves to work on the estate of the cruel Sansho from the title, who seems to have the exact opposite philosophy: people are worthless and their only task is to serve him.
There are some depressive, bleak moments in this middle segment, such as when a 70-year old slave is re-captured by the guards, who protests ("I've been working patiently for 50 years! Let me die a free man! I don't want to die here!"), and none other than Zushio, now a "collaborator" of Sansho's, punishes the old man by branding him with a hot iron. This shows how Zushio abandoned his father's and his own humanity to embrace evil which will secure him a comfortable life in captivity. There are some philosophical contemplations presented here, such as if goodness can be unlearned, as some sort of nature vs. nurture experiment, and Zushio's quest to get back to his soul, to his roots. This is embodied symbolically in Sansho's son Taro who left the estate and became a monk at a temple, who says this tragic observation: "I found that humans have little sympathy for things that don’t directly concern them." The final third, the "rags to riches" epic comeback segment, works as some sort of blend of the endings of "Oliver Twist" and "The Ten Commandments", as Zushio allegorically returns to his father's legacy and decides to make a remarkable, idealistic change to the society, to do what is in his power to make life better for the oppressed. The final sequence is one of the most emotional and moving moments of 50s cinema, not to be missed. If the first two thirds of the movie had been as good as its last third, it would have been a much better movie, yet it still deserves to be seen.
Grade:+++
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