Sansho the Bailiff

A masterpiece managed with exquisite patience, the film is slow-moving only in the sense that it doesn’t have to move for anybody; Mizoguchi’s hands and eyes search out every crevice along the eternal landscape, granting his characters clemency, or breaking their legs, based on the roll of an infinite-sided die.

The story is an eventful one full of cruelty and heartache. The film is also stylistically extraordinary. In his 1939 “The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum,” Mizoguchi showed his mastery of the moving camera, using long takes heavily influenced by Japanese scroll painting. In this movie the camera still moves, but with more nuance and subtlety. It’s as if he’s distilled the extreme sophistication of his narrative style down to its most simple components. The results are devastating throughout.

The underlying response of the movie to these complicated ideological impulsions may be interpreted both politically and religiously. Seen from a political point of view, the film seems to expound the purest liberalism. Against tyranny it sets law; against captivity, freedom.