• 地獄門 (Gate of Hell)

5/18/19 (Sat)

I watched Kinugasa Teinosuke’s 1953 film after the death of its star Kyo Machiko a few days earlier. This was apparently Japan’s first color film to be distributed worldwide, and it made a huge impression, winning major awards at Cannes, the Oscars and elsewhere. Coming shortly after Rashomon, it cemented Japan’s place on the map of world cinema, a position that was to be further enhanced over the decade to follow. (Some have suggested that the title in Japanese, Jigokumon, was aimed at riding the coattails of Rashomon (mon = gate), but that seems far-fetched.)

The setting is the Heiji Rebellion of 1160, when the Taira leader Kiyomori (a frequent name in Noh dramas) comes under challenge from the rival Minamoto clan. The film opens abruptly in a remarkable whirlwind of color and movement during an attempted coup d’état, which seems to point to a samurai spectacle. But the story takes a sharp turn once the dust clears toward the personal obsession of one soldier for a woman he had been guarding during the coup attempt. He asks the general for her hand, only to discover she is already married. That prompts callous laughter by others in the general’s audience, but that humiliation and realization that she is out of reach only heighten his determination to have her. As he becomes increasingly rash in his actions, the woman attempts to ignore him, and her honorable husband keeps his cool in hope that the guy will fade away, even intentionally letting him win a horse race to provide him a dignified exit. The soldier only becomes more fixated on the woman, however, and eventually threatens to kill her mother if she does not agree to a scheme to get rid of her husband and give herself over to him. The desperate woman ultimately makes a supreme sacrifice to save her husband and her own honor.

The story is somewhat underdeveloped. Most notably, it’s not clear why the woman, knowing that the killer is on his way, doesn’t just tell her husband and allow him to defend himself rather than passively accepting her fate. The act of self-sacrifice is a much-loved theme in Japanese drama dating back centuries, but it needs to be properly set up in order to establish the stakes. I assume the wife was responding to what may she may have perceived as her husband’s Hamlet-like hesitance to act to protect her honor when challenged earlier, but I had thought in context that he was taking the high road. His love for her is never in question, as shown in numerous scenes. Her reaction seemed extreme in context.

That said, the husband’s decision not to kill the man who has just slaughtered his wife, however mistakenly, is interesting in theory but unrealistic as presented. He is crushed at the thought that his wife clearly did not trust him to protect her or himself. The murderer actually asks to be put to death after realizing his error, but the husband philosophizes that it would not bring his wife back, which is true but an oddly calm rationale under the circumstances. His attitude comes off as wishy-washy rather than noble. I suppose the idea was the contrast between the husband’s detached cool and the killer’s blind passion, but both characters felt exaggerated, and their melodramatic dialogue toward the end in particular sounded phony.

I was not surprised to hear that the script timetable was rushed. The premise of the story wasn’t uninteresting, and a bit more (well, a lot more) polishing would have helped considerably.

What the film does have in spades is tremendous production values, especially the moody lighting and vivid colors. This must be the most dynamic use of color on film prior to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. Kinugasa quickly took to then-innovative technology, breaking out of the black-and-white world like a kid with a new crayon set. There is nothing random about his palette, which are very precisely chosen for the scene as a whole and against other colors. At the same time, the director is not afraid to pull back in order to set the mood, such as the quietly tense scene setting up the murder at the end. The visuals alone make the film worth seeing.

Unfortunately the direction of the story itself, which begins so energetically, gradually betrays its stage origins in the second half with a rather stodgy approach. It was like two films spliced together. Its reputation overseas may have been more from the exotic subject matter and presentation in the early 1950s than from the overall quality. It has not aged well in that sense. The acting is very fine, especially Kyo Machiko as the noble wife and Yamagata Isao as the husband whose decency is his downfall (screen idol Hasegawa Kazuo is the obsessed warrior), and certainly the visual splendor holds up. This is more a case of what might have been.