Obscure Japanese Film #36
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Ayako Wakao
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In the second of her three films for Yuzo Kawashima (the others being Women are Born Twice and Elegant Beast), Ayako Wakao stars as
Satoko, the mistress of Nangaku Kishimoto, a famous painter (Ganjiro Nakamura)
who falls ill. When his friend Jikai, a Buddhist priest (Masao Mishima), comes
to visit him on his deathbed, Kishimoto asks him to look after Satoko once he’s
gone. The funeral soon follows, but Satoko is unable to attend for fear of
scandal, so instead she visits Jikai’s temple a week later to burn incense in
tribute. Jikai tells her of Nangaku’s last wish and forces himself on her. Satoko
resists at first, but soon gives in and, for lack of a better option, goes to
live with him at the temple. She endures Jikai’s embraces without complaint but
soon begins to feel sympathy for Jinen (Kuniichi Takami), a young acolyte who
works at the temple, where he lives in a tiny, cramped room resembling an
animal’s cage and is treated like a slave by Jikai.
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Masao Mishima gets some good news from Ganjiro Nakamura
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Set in Kyoto during the
1930s, the story is reminiscent of Yukio Mishima’s novel The Temple of the Golden Pavilion, Kon Ichikawa’s 1958 film version
of which also featured Ganjiro Nakamura – although in that film it was he who
played a randy and none-too-pious priest. Like the stuttering acolyte portrayed
by Raizo Ichikawa in that film, Jinen secretly despises his master, whom he
sees as cynical and corrupt. Kawashima’s film is an extremely faithful
adaptation of a prize-winning 1961 novella by Tsutomu Mizukami, an author
better known for his Seicho Matsumoto-like social crime thrillers such as Straits of Hunger (Kiga kaikyo),
brilliantly filmed in 1965 by Tomu Uchida. The
Temple of Wild Geese contains strong autobiographical elements as Mizukami
himself had been harshly treated as an acolyte in his youth. However, the
similarities to Mishima’s work are far from coincidental as Mizukami went on to
write Gobancho Yugirirou, a 1962
novel inspired by the same incident (filmed by Tomotaka Tasaka the following
year) and, in 1979, a non-fiction account of the case entitled Kinkaku enjo (The Burning of the Golden
Pavilion).
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Kuniichi Takami
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In an effort to avoid
spoilers, I’ll just say that things get quite dark in this film until a jarring
transition to colour at the end when Dixieland jazz bursts out on the
soundtrack and we find ourselves in the present day as tourists visit the
temple to see the famous paintings of wild geese by Nangaku which decorate the
interior. The credits sequence at the beginning is also shot in colour and
makes good use of the same paintings, but the rest of the movie is superbly
shot in black and white by Sword of Doom
cinematographer Hiroshi Murai, who comes up with some quite striking
compositions. Sei Ikeno’s suitably ominous music score is also a plus.
Stout character actor
Masao Mishima had perhaps his largest and best screen role here as the
saké-guzzling, acolyte-abusing dirty old priest, and certainly makes the most
of it. His incessant humming was an especially good touch, I felt, and in his
hands Jikai comes across as even more despicable than he does in the book. It’s
perhaps unsurprising, then, that the film’s release was the subject of indignant
protests by many among the Buddhist community in Japan at the time. The star of
the show, however, is Ayako Wakao, whose performance is flawless as usual. The
role is an almost perfect fit for her, while the little-known Kuniichi Takami
is also a good choice as Jinen, although he understandably lacks the slightly
misshapen head of the book’s protagonist.
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Wakao and Takami
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So, why, despite excellent
work in every department, is the film somehow less compelling than it should have
been? I think there are a number of reasons. Firstly, the story lacks an
obvious central character with whom we can identify. Although Satoko is
sympathetic, she’s so pragmatically accepting of her fate that it’s hard to
relate to her, while Jinen, with his talk of the black kite that hides
half-dead snakes, fish and rats in a hole at the top of a tree, in which they
squirm around in a kind of hellish menagerie,* is too creepy to win us over. I
was surprised that Kawashima included this in the film but it’s quite well
done. Although the pause button reveals the use of a puppet for the shot where
the bird drops a snake into the hole, it’s not obvious when watching at normal
speed. But it’s also an indication that this may be a rare case of a film being
too faithful to its source for its own good. Kawashima shows little feel for
pace, with some shots going on too long, while the music is used too sparingly
and the final 15 minutes seem largely superfluous, especially the eccentric
epilogue. Wakao’s big scene just before the prologue is a rare deviation from
the novel, but one which seems completely over the top and was obviously
motivated solely by the desire to give the star a moment of high drama to go
out on. Still, despite these quibbles, I consider The Temple of Wild Geese to be an unusual film of overall high
quality which is well worth seeing.
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The puppet shot
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The original novella is
available in a fine English translation by Dennis Washburn published by the
Dalkey Archive in 2008 in an omnibus edition with the same author’s Bamboo Dolls of Echizen (also turned
into a film starring Ayako Wakao).
* Author Mizukami later wrote an entire book based on this - see my review here.
