Dendera

In Shichiro Fukazawa’s story The Ballad of Narayama (magnificently filmed by Shohei Imamura in 1983), village law dictates that old people must die when they reach the age of 70, to make way for the next generation. In his novel Dendera, Yuya Sato imagines an alternative outcome, and that’s what Daisuke Tengan (Imamura’s eldest son and latter-day script collaborator) has filmed here. We’re back in the mountains of Tohoku, and back with the harsh but inflexible laws that govern a village community. But when Kayu is carried up the mountain and left to die by her son, she wakes to find herself in Dendera, a new settlement created by elderly women who have refused to die – and who don’t rescue the village’s old men. Now Dendera’s Amazon-like founder Mei is plotting a bloody revenge attack on the village which cast them out. Before the militant elderly women can fight back, though, they are themselves attacked by a marauding brown bear… This is essentially a mainstream entertainment, and Tengan wisely doesn’t try to copy his father’s aesthetic. But he sure knows how to build suspense and stage a bear-hunt climax. –BFI