Review of Mizoguchi's Ugetsu

            Kenji Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu is set in 16^th century Medieval Japan. Mizoguchi weaves a story around a pottery merchant who is overcome with greed by his success in the pottery trade. Right from the start the film brings us into the chaos of Medieval Japan. The life of a simple farmer and pottery trader is constantly unsettled by civil war. The marauding bands rape and pillage the villagers. Against the odds the pottery merchant sells his wares to great profit. But the lure of great profits foreshadows turmoil to come in the pottery merchants life.

            With great skill and strength this simple villager makes pottery and transports it to a trading center. There he meets a Medieval Lady who buys some of his pottery and asks him to deliver it to her manor.

            This is all set-up. The greedy merchant, the noble Lady, and the chaos of war provide context for the story. The noble Lady appears on the screen quite conspicuously. An overhead shot follows her as she makes her way to the pottery merchant. This film was made in the 1950s. It’s style has some surreal qualities to it; the introduction of the noble Lady, the scene on the lake, and the scenes at the noble Lady’s manor. I thought the cinematography was very good. As the story progresses the camera becomes more surreal in line with the plot. When the pottery merchant makes his way to the noble Lady’s manor, he is taken in and seduced by the noble Lady. He can’t resist. She charms him and persuades him to stay with her and be her husband.

            So the story is set-up, a greedy merchant out for riches and status can’t resist a mysterious noble Lady who has a keen interest in his goods. Now the film progresses into confrontation. The dramatic action rises between the characters of the film. The pottery merchant’s friend becomes a samurai through less than honest ways, the friend’s wife is raped and turns to prostitution, and the pottery merchants wife is killed by marauding soldiers. Throughout all this action the pottery merchant is seduced deeper into the noble Lady’s plot to marry him.

            This is where the climax of the film comes. When the pottery merchant attempts to buy things for the noble Lady, he is refused and told to take his things and leave. Unknown to him is that the noble Lady is an evil spirit back from the dead. On his way home the pottery merchant runs into a religious person who says he can rid the pottery merchant of the spirit of the noble Lady.

            The pottery merchant returns and the noble Lady discovers sanscrit writings on his skin. He implores the noble Lady to let him go home, he has a wife and child. But the evil spirit refuses to let him go. In the best scene of the movie,  the pottery merchant lashes out against the noble Lady and her nurse. Swinging a samurai sword, he falls through Japanese doors and ends up on the ground, throughout this sequence the evil spirit calls out the pottery merchant’s name. The voice of the ghost gives the scene a dream-like, surreal quality.

            Thus the conflict ends. The pottery merchant makes it back to his village. He finds his wife and child alive and his greatly relieved. But as day breaks, the village leader tells the pottery merchant that his wife had been killed. Another dream had taken a hold of the pottery merchant.

            Ugetsu was a fantastic story about greed and ambition. It warns it’s viewers to not be greedy or ambitious because they lead to the wrong path in live. At the end of the movie the pottery merchants friend has given up his quest to be a samurai and has returned to a simpler life of self sacrifice as a farmer. The pottery merchant for giving in to his greed for profit and ambition to status as a noble encountered an evil spirit, and perhaps, lost his wife because he was away too long. In the end he returns to the simple life of making pottery.

            I thought this film presses upon traditional Japanese values of self-sacrifice and humility. Made at around the same time as Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and Yasujiro Ozu’s Tokyo Story, the film has similar high standard, Yet Mizoguchi delves into a moral tale intertwined with mysticism, unlike Ozu who focuses on personal relationships or Kurosawa who focuses more on Samurai.

            A great film, great plot development, great setup, and the conflict with the evil spirit was, at least to me, totally unpredictable.