• 永遠の人 (Immortal Love)

8/11/23 (Fri)

The Japanese title of Kinoshita Keisuke’s 1961 film is literally “the everlasting person”, which would at first glance imply a soul mate or life partner. Here, however, it is used ironically to indicate someone that the protagonist can never shake off – the memory of her true love, the reality of her spiteful husband, or possibly the resentful person that she herself has become. The British title, Bitter Spirit, comes closer to the sense of this relentlessly bleak film.

The film covers a three-decade span in the life of Sadako (Takamine Hideko), daughter of a tenant farmer. The film opens in 1932, when Koshimizu (Nakadai Tatsuya), son of the wealthy landowner who employs Sadako’s father, comes back from the growing conflict in China crippled by a leg injury. His sense of shame has left him embittered and drained of feeling; he can’t even bring himself to acknowledge the cheering crowd that his father has arranged for him. He carries a hatred for another tenant farmer’s son Takashi (Sada Keiji), who was not only superior to him in school but, in contrast to his own failure as a soldier, has distinguished himself in war as well.

When he learns that Takashi is going to marry the beautiful Sadako, he forcibly takes her as his own, telling her that the yet-to-return Takashi is probably dead anyway and issuing veiled threats against her father as well as Takashi’s family. He then rapes her, prompting her to attempt suicide. When Takashi returns from the front, he runs to her immediately. He dismisses her concern that she is damaged goods and arranges to elope with her that night. In the end, however, he realizes that their marriage would only bring misery to herself and others, and tells her via a messenger that he is leaving.

As the years pass, we see that she is now in a loveless marriage with the brutal Koshimizu, who abuses her physically and mentally. She also has to take care of his bedridden father, who is just as cruelly demanding. The son uses his own imagined status as victim as a weapon to beat her down. At one point, he hires Takashi’s wife as a maid in order to torment both his wife and her ex-lover. “Just imagine how Takashi must feel,” he sneers. “Both his old love and his wife will be under my keep.” For her part, Sadako tries to be decent to the wife, but the latter rejects her, convinced that her husband and Sadako still love each other. She ultimately leaves after the master tries to rape her as well. (He reasons, “Takashi has stolen my wife; I’ll steal his.”)

Sadako’s eldest son Eiichi (Tamura Masakazu in his film debut), the product of the husband’s rape, despises the mother for her alleged treatment of him growing up. The father openly proclaims the boy to be his favorite, ignoring the other two children before him, and his hard feelings toward the mother are crystal clear to all. When the son learns the circumstances behind his birth, he throws himself into the river where the mother once contemplated her own suicide. The heartbroken father blames Sadako. Years later, the second son, now a Communist fighting in the Anpo demos of the early 1960s, purposely brings her to the spot overlooking the mountain where his elder brother took his life and tells her that he will never forgive her unless she forgives the father. He also speaks of a legend in which thousands of farmers were betrayed, massacred and buried under the family’s lands, leaving it cursed.

After other dramatic events, including the reappearance of a character that we had assumed dead, Sadako allows her daughter to marry Takashi’s son, therefore achieving the union between the families, i.e., landowner’s daughter and tenant farmer’s son, that she and Takashi never realized. Koshimizu is outraged that she has gone behind his back, but she stands her ground. He accuses her of turning the children against him and asks who will look after him now. Astonishingly, he insists that everything he did stemmed from his love for her (“as I yelled at you and hit you, all I wanted was you”) and demands an apology. She shoots back that she doesn’t believe a word of it.

In the final year, 1961, Takashi is dying of consumption. His son and daughter-in-law bring their newborn child to him, allowing him to see his prodigy before his demise. Sadako begs Koshimizu to go to Takashi’s sickbed and give his blessing to the daughter, but he refuses to do so. Disgusted, she spits that she will go and lie that her husband has assented. As she runs out, Koshimizu limps along behind, agreeing to forgive their daughter if Takashi will forgive him. In one of the strangest near-closing lines ever, he tells the wife, “You and I may never be reconciled until one of us dies. Then that’s our destiny. But starting today, I want you to massage my leg.” She assents, signaling, if not a reconciliation, a less fraught relationship, which I suppose counts as a hopeful ending. The act of forgiveness appears to have opened the way to healing.

Music (scored here as always by the director’s brother Chuji) is not normally Kinoshita’s strong suit, but he delivers a surprise with, of all things, flamenco music marking each of the five chapters that separate the intervening years. That seems incongruous at first in the Japanese setting, but the contrast works unexpectedly well. At one point, the lyrics say curiously that Sadako “became a demon because / she married a man she disliked and bore his children” and that her family “became victims / of her fiery flames”. That doesn’t match what we see on screen; it is Koshimizu who seems the more aggressively angry of the two. I’m not sure what the songwriters were trying to say here. Still, the guitar music itself was highly evocative.

The setting offers breathtaking views of the hills, fields and waterfalls around Mt Aso in Kyushu. Takamine and Nakadai give intense performances, and the portrait of the crumbling feudal structure, in which landowner and farmer ultimately merge, gives the film weight. However, it should be said that the grim nature of the story, powerlessness (or resignation) of the protagonist, and the nastiness of the main characters won’t be for everyone.