Movie Review: Ballad of Narayama
A transporting film
This movie is part documentary, part drama. It’s like an animal documentary, only humans are the animals. Anthropology. Ballad of Narayama is a Japanese movie about a community of peasants that live on the slopes of a mountain called Narayama. They scratch the earth with crude implements. Food is scarce and people who steal food are put to death — an entire family is buried to death by the community after it is discovered their father has been stealing potatoes from other people’s land. Gambling consists of each person bringing a bunch of potatoes, then the one who picks the long stick carries away the potatoes as the one who gets the short stick loses all of his.
Meanwhile, winter is coming and people have to put food away for the harsh, cold times ahead. They can’t afford to have too many mouths to feed — the only reason the father of the family that got buried alive started stealing from his neighbours is because he has a large family. So sometimes when children are born in a family, they are sold, and some are killed. In addition, when parents become old, they are taken up the mountain and left there to die.
The community has evolved a whole mythos around this ritual. A man who refuses to do this to his mother is seen as a soft-hearted coward, an outcast. In the story we are watching, a woman in her sixties decides she is ready to ascend Narayama, even though she looks pretty healthy and strong. She even bites on a stone forcefully just so she can lose her front teeth and convince her family that she is ready (she had gotten a reputation for having extremely strong teeth). She devoutly believes in the Narayama mythos. When she gets there and her son leaves her, she sits there in content meditation like a Buddhist saint.
When I said this movie is an animal documentary, it’s because it is full of shots that capture nature and animal life: birds on tree boughs, a snake in the grass, mating insects; and these wildlife shots blend into the shots of life in the community and in betwixt drama scenes, giving the impression that the humans are just another type of animal on the forested slopes of Narayama. It’s a beautiful movie.
