‘Ugetsu’ 4K UHD Blu-ray Review: The Criterion Collection

Mizoguchi Kenji’s staggering Ugetsu is a movie of many riddles and paradoxes that unfolds with the illusory simplicity of a fable. Its preliminary straightforwardness, as a parable towards the pitfalls of human greed, is a misdirection that leads us right into a void during which objectivity and subjectivity intermingle, hopelessly and invigoratingly clouding rationality.

The narrative begins on the shore of Japan’s Lake Biwa within the sixteenth century, when the nation was engulfed in civil conflict. Mizoguchi spotlights two neighboring households: Genjurô (Mori Masayuki), his spouse Miyagi (Tanaka Kinuyo), and their little one (Sawamura Ichisaburo); and Tôbei (Ozawa Eitarô) and his spouse Ohama (Mito Mitsuko). The heads of those households are broadly contrasted, as Genjurô is a severe potter whereas Tôbei is a stumbling ne’er-do-well whose goals of turning into a samurai are ridiculous in lieu of his humble origins. (The movie is alert to the classism of the samurai code.) Warfare is coming, and like many individuals unaccustomed to its savagery, Genjurô and Tôbei see solely glory and self-actualization. The males want to revenue from the conflict in order to bolster their statuses of their wives’ eyes, whereas the ladies insist that the lads are already sufficient for them.

It’s on this consciousness of miscommunication that Ugetsu, written by Kawaguchi Matsutarô and Yoda Yoshikata, ought to particularly resonate with modern Western audiences, because the movie’s understanding of the strain between the sexes hasn’t aged an iota. The males launder their ambition by their girls in a technique of self-justification that reveals their emotions of inferiority. Patriarchy additionally entraps males, most clearly these of decrease courses, nurturing a perpetual worry of impotency that’s sarcastically realized by the efforts to assuage stated worry.

Ugetsu’s early passages unfold with a hushed sense of inevitability. A city elder warns the households to arrange for an incoming invasion, however Genjurô and Tôbei are eaten up with greenback indicators. Each males forge their wares and make a small killing at a village that’s experiencing an financial growth from the conflict, and so they return dwelling with silver of their pockets. Genjurô buys Miyagi an costly kimono, saying that he’s all the time needed to bathe her with such luxurious. Whether or not or not Miyagi really desires the kimono is immaterial.

Ugetsu is predicated on two ghost tales from Akinari Ueda’s assortment Ugetsu Monogatari, which interprets to Tales of Moonlight and Rain, and pivots on morals handed down from Japanese and Chinese language cultures. One other important affect on the movie is the writing of Man de Maupassant, which is obvious in Tôbei’s narrative. These sources share with Mizoguchi’s work a heightened consciousness of how we devise our personal tragedies with our hypocrisies, and of how cruelty begets cruelty in an countless and self-perpetuating cycle.

In Ugetsu, conflict is brilliantly evoked as an extension of the male ego: The Japanese civil conflict exists on the macro stage of society whereas the home tragedies of Genjurô and Tôbei occupy the micro. The civil conflict dramatically reconstitutes Genjurô and Tôbei’s households, scarring them in a vogue that parallels the destruction of the home of Woman Wasaka (Kyô Machiko), a spirit who enchants Genjurô whereas his own residence turns to war-torn rubble.

The ironies listed here are elusively exponential, as a simulacrum of Genjurô’s dream—as the top of a home occupied by a wonderful, glamorous, and subservient lady—paves the way in which for his nightmare of rootlessness, which resonates with a postwar Japan that was occupied by america after dropping its personal quest for dominion. The movie’s obsession with the splintering of households and the decisive castration and evolution of the trendy male clearly parallels Japan’s disaster of identification following WWII, which Mizoguchi would discover once more in Sansho the Bailiff.

On the movie’s floor is the assertion that man shouldn’t be grasping, however Mizoguchi resists such pat categorization—and it’s this simultaneous explicitness and ambiguity that inform Ugetsu with its roiling energy. Mizoguchi’s formalism brings to life the irresolvable thorniness of lust, longing, love, and self-hatred. The scenes between Genjurô and Woman Waska, set amongst a dream of what her palace as soon as was and clearly modeled on the traditions of Noh Theater, are among the many most erotic ever dedicated to movie, expressing intercourse by heightened classical roleplay.

Woman Waska strikes by the body with a languorousness that’s true to our notion of her supernatural otherness, or as a masturbatory phantasm of Genjurô’s. They’ve tea collectively and Woman Wasaka enhances Genjurô’s pottery, understanding that males secretly treasure flattery as a lot, if no more so, than girls. Then, a protracted shot follows Woman Wasaka as she crosses a room, her hair right down to the again of her knees, suggesting a serpent in a flourish that’s horny in addition to threatening. We consider Genjurô when he says that he’s by no means identified such pleasure, as Woman Wasaka convincingly suggests capital-S intercourse as pure flesh incarnate, complemented by the sensuality of Mizoguchi’s legendary lengthy takes and in-camera enhancing.

Mizoguchi’s masterful staging conjoins the conflict narrative and the supernatural symbolism with scary finesse, typically in a single shot, akin to when Genjurô returns to his destroyed dwelling looking for Miyagi, strolling out again solely to re-enter the entrance of the residence to see her impossibly manifested, cooking by a fireplace. Embracing the circulate of Japanese scrolls, Mizoguchi perfected an artwork of fluidity, mixing expressionism and heightened neorealism in a fashion that heightens every aesthetic by way of unlikely juxtaposition. When Genjurô and Tôbei’s households flee their invaded village, they sail right into a lake of mist that means the River Styx, matter-of-factly guiding the viewers out of a conflict movie right into a horror movie and again right into a conflict movie but once more.

Later, as Miyagi collapses from a stab wound, we see her die as her killers get pleasure from their spoils in a chic and devastating distinction of what conflict means to women and men, and to a number of variations of the empowered and the powerless. Whereas Miyagi dies, Genjurô has the privilege of retreatment into an ecstasy that’s, itself, enabled by male carnage. Ugetsu is a tragic, poetic, and irreconcilably rapturous imaginative and prescient of violation. Within the custom of many male administrators preoccupied with the atrocities suffered by girls, Mizoguchi expresses his compassion by a pronounced and cleaning pitilessness.

Picture/Sound

The 4K restoration right here debuted on the Criterion Collection’s Blu-ray launch in 2017. Other than the ocassional instability, the presentation is flawless. The picture boasts an immaculate sense of richness and readability, and in comparison with the picture on Criterion’s 2005 DVD version, the blacks are a lot deeper and extra secure, whereas the whites are softer and extra different. There’s additionally a larger tactility to this picture, which is obvious within the textures of the landscapes, the water, and the usually pained and impassioned faces of the characters.

The soundtrack can be the identical because the one on the 2017 Blu-ray, and it boasts fewer hisses and a extra vibrant and delicate palette of diegetic and non-diegetic results than the monitor on the 2005 DVD. The rating, a basic in its personal proper, resounds with an particularly diaphanous subtlety.

Extras

Sure, this is identical bundle that accompanied Criterion’s prior two editions of Ugetsu, however these dietary supplements can be troublesome to enhance upon, as they provide an invigoratingly deep dive into Mizoguchi Kenji’s profession whereas shedding mild for Western audiences on the Japanese postwar tradition that knowledgeable the movie. The audio commentary by critic, filmmaker, and pageant programmer Tony Rayns begins on a playful be aware, with Rayns conceding that a lot of his observations stem from a Mizoguchi e book that he by no means completed. This drollness permeates a commentary that invaluably elaborates on the evolution of the filmmaker’s aesthetic over the a long time, whereas riffing on the types of politics and private relationships that inform artwork.

Rayns additionally discusses at size Ugetsu Monogatari, the story assortment that partially impressed Ugetsu. This dialogue is complemented by the interview with the movie’s first assistant director, Tanaka Tokuzo, who exhibits us Mizoguchi’s oft-revised working draft of the movie’s script. In the meantime, “Two Worlds Intertwined,” a 2005 appreciation of Ugetsu by Shinoda Masahiro, abounds in stunning and incisive observations, together with the memorable assertion that the movie contains “so many realities that they flip right into a type of fantasy.” (Shinoda additionally elaborates on the intricate, multi-cultured layering of the movie’s rating.) The 1992 interview with cinematographer Miyagawa Kazuo is the shortest on the disc, however nonetheless affords the legend the chance to match classic and modern strategies of visible storytelling.

Tying the room collectively, so to talk, is a 150-minute documentary, Kenji Mizoguchi: The Lifetime of a Movie Director, which ingeniously weaves its personal making into its narrative. The filmmakers retrace Japanese landmarks which might be important to Mizoguchi’s life, within the course of offering Western audiences with a revelatory spatial sense of areas that have been instrumental within the Japanese pre- and postwar movie actions. Rounding out this bundle are trailers, a characteristically very good essay by Phillip Lopate that juggles Western and Jap philosophies with surgical finesse, in addition to the Ugetsu Monogatari tales that knowledgeable the script.

General

This masterpiece of world cinema has by no means seemed or sounded higher, with a classic dietary supplements bundle that gives invaluable evaluation of Japanese movie tradition.