Under the Blossoming Cherry Trees
(Sakura no mori no mankai no shita, 1975)

Shinoda Masahiro

Japan

95 min, color, Japanese (English subtitles)

Review © 2006 Branislav L. Slantchev

Part ghost-story in the tradition of Kwaidan and part bizarre love-story about a woman ensnaring a less than righteous man in a mode reminiscent of Ugetsu, this film manages to be exquisitely cruel and at the same time strangely alluring, which is not something one normally sees in a thinly veiled sociopolitical commentary. Like Mizoguchi, Shinoda is often interested in the role of women in Japanese society and the place they are supposed to occupy under traditional masculine mores. Unlike the melancholy auteur, however, Shinoda is a lot more ambivalent about the true status of their supposed subjugation by men. In some ways, the supposedly helpless female is the true ruler of what appears to be a man's world. And the fact she exercises that power only indirectly, through manipulating the man's lust for her, does not make it any less real.

Love at first enchantment	The fateful decision

The film opens in modern times with scenes of people enjoying the spring blossoming of cherry trees, a favorite pastime of Japanese. A childlike voice ominously tells us that before the Edo period, cherry trees were not seen as something to be marveled at, and were known for the curse that would haunt anyone who dared walk underneath, not their beauty. To tell the truth, I have no idea whether this is right historically because to my knowledge cherry-viewing parties had been organized for ages before the Tokugawa period, at least by the aristocracy. And I always thought that cherry blossoms were associated with the transitory and perhaps illusory human condition, that their beauty and impermanence was a symbol of our fleeting physical existence.

I thought I was marrying a manly man	You have to kill them

Not so in this film, where the blossoms are the upsetters of the existing social order. In a strange way, they both damn (because they seem to cause one to lose his mind) and liberate (because with the loss of one's mind goes the loss of one's chains to society). One curious thing to note is that only men are shown as being affected by the "curse." Whether this was by design or by omission, I have no idea, but Shinoda does not strike me as one who would miss such an obvious detail. As the carriers of norms and effective prison guards who enforce the prevailing order, men are the natural target of such a transformation. Women, if anything, are its agents. And that a wholesale change is necessary is made clear by the group of Buddhist monks, who are part and parcel of the order, who are all liberated by the curse.

I want her for my maid	The pastime of a big city girl

WARNING: spoilers follow

The story itself is quite simple in terms of events, even if it may defy easy interpretation. Wakayama Tomisaburo is a rough mountain man who waylays passing travelers and robs them. At least that's what he does until the day he ambushes a man whose wife (Iwashita Shima) immediately captivates him with her mysterious beauty. He murders her husband and their servant, and forces her to become his wife. But what begins as the ultimate expression of male dominance soon becomes far murkier for rather than be the helpless victim of her captor's aggression, the woman soon assumes the dominant position in their relationship. Playing on his animal lust for her, she demands that he treat her as a lady, which includes, among other things, carrying her on his back lest she hurt her feet on the mountain paths. The odd reversal of the oppressor and the subjugated is made blatantly clear by her physically towering over him, and on his back too.

Monks going mad	Theater of the grotesque

As if to dispel any doubt about who is going to rule this relationship, she taunts him about his lack of physical prowess, then mocks his proud claims to be the "ruler of his domain," and finally orders him to murder the other "wives" he has squirreled away in his remote shack. He meekly complies and kills all of them except one lame girl who the new wife demands as a maid. The man's life begins revolving solely around his new conquest, and he is forced to procure an ever-expanding list of items for her (by robbing others, obviously). Finally, she gets bored with their solitary dwelling and demands that he take her to the city. Despite his obvious discomfort (he is completely out of place in the city; people make fun of him, he does not know how to use money), he complies. The woman the goes into overdrive and uses the threat to withhold sex to demand that he bring her the severed heads of various people so she can stage her little grizzly love plays with them.

I need more heads for my party	Extreme casting session

As the days pass, the heads decay and rot away, and the house in which they are squatting is falling apart, the dissolution paralleling the degradation of the man's psyche and his increasingly destructive bond with his wife. He is reduced to begging for food even though his bandit skills should have made it straightforward to obtain some cash in, ahem, less humiliating ways. But it seems that he's lost his zest for life: while he was shown energetically hunting in the mountain forests, he is now depicted as a listless fish out of water; he is not in his element and he does not even seen to be able to break away. His wife appears to have gripped him tight. Eventually, he realizes that this existence is going to kill him and resolves to head back to the freedom of his beloved mountains. He is prepared to be abandoned by his wife but she surprises him by meekly accepting his decision and declaring her ever-lasting love for him, a love that, she claims, would force her go anywhere he goes just to be with him.

Morbid sexuality as becomes a ghost	Everything falling apart

But we know that this is a lie. Not that she would not follow him, after all her power needs someone to rule over if it is to have any meaning. But we suspect that she is not about to march blithely back into oblivion. Even though her husband does not realize it yet, he has freed himself from her spell and she knows it. If he is permitted to depart, if he is forced to make a choice between her and his freedom, she has no doubt where she will stand. So she goes with him, and for a while it seems that they have returned to the earlier "happier" days as he carries her on his back high up the slopes. In his exultation, the man appears to think that nothing can harm him, that his wife's coming with him and her apparent love have made him invincible. So he decides to dare fate by walking under the blossoming cherry trees.

Wherever you go, I go	Back full circle to happier days

It is then that her true nature is revealed and the cherry blossoms, instead of causing him to lose his mind, actually open his eyes and show his wife as the ugly supernatural spirit that she is. The man goes berserk and strangles her. When the deed is done, the blossoms having accomplished their purpose, she reverts back to her human form and we know that she was no supernatural being. That does not mean her ghost form was any less real, of course, and that's where Shinoda's ambivalence to women shows through. Stripped of the supernatural, the only explanation is that the man saw behind his wife's mask, if only for a fleeting instant, and that revelation yanked him out of his dreamy existence in her shadow. In other words, while Shinoda depicts a world ostensibly dominated by men, the real oppressors are the women who are in control, and so the cherry blossoms are not really a curse at all. The irony, of course, is that they have lost their liberating spell in the modern world where men regard them merely as pretty sights. In a way, modernity has not only tamed men, but has also deprived them of their only chance to see through their supposed freedom, to realize that they are not in control of anything.

Is she the one?	Under the cherry blossoms

The Toho DVD is that rare beast: a Japanese disc with English subtitles. The video transfer is at the unusual 1.55:1 aspect ratio (OAR) and is anamorphically enhanced. It is very nice and does justice to Shinoda's mesmerizing eye for composition. The Dolby Digital monoaural soundtrack is in Japanese and is very crisp. There is not a whole lot of speech in this film, but the music is stunning, and the soundtrack does it justice. The only extra is a long trailer for the film. All menus are in Japanese. Definitely a film that must be seen and then watched again. It looks gorgeous but its subversive message will give any feminist a pause.

February 24, 2006