Onibaba

Two women, one middle aged and the other her son's widow, struggle to survive during wartime in medieval Japan. The young husband has been killed in the ongoing civil war, and the women live in a field of tall grasses, robbing and killing passing soldiers and selling their belongings to survive. They dispose of the victims by throwing their bodies into a deep hole. A deserter becomes their accomplice, inciting rivalry and sexual jealousy. Another warrior, who wears a demon mask, arrives and the fates of the four converge in a horrifying conclusion. Japanese screenwriter-director Kaneto Shindo, who died in 2012 at the age of 100, wrote over 200 screenplays for directors such as Kenji Mizoguchi, Kozaburo Yoshimura, and Yasujiro Shimazu, as well as writing and directing more than forty films of his own. Shindo's breakthrough film as director was Children of Hiroshima (1952), a docudrama about children who survived the atomic bombing in that city (of which Shindo was a native) during World War II. Nobuko Otowa, who plays the mother in Onibaba, was Shindo's favorite leading lady. She appeared in all but one of the films he directed, among them the horror classic Kuroneko (1968). She became Shindo's mistress while he was married to his second wife, and the couple later wed following his divorce and his ex-wife's death. Jitsuko Yoshimura, who plays the daughter, was discovered by director Shohei Imamura and worked in several of his films. She also appeared in Akira Kurosawa's Dodes'ka-den (1970). In his long career, Kei Sato, who plays Hachi in Onibaba appeared in everything from serials to a Godzilla movie, working with most of Japan's greatest directors, including several films with Nagisa Oshima, most notably as the rapist in 1966's Violence at Noon. Onibaba was Shindo's first film set in ancient times. But rather than the classic formalism other Japanese directors used in period films, Onibaba is raw and visceral. There is an air of menace in the shots of tall, undulating grasses. The nudity is disheveled, the sex is urgent and more explicit than most films made at that time. As A.H. Weiler wrote in his New York Times review, Shindo "relies mainly on raw qualities that are neither new nor especially inventive to achieve his stark, occasionally shocking effects. Although his artistic integrity remains untarnished, his driven rustic principals are exotic, sometimes grotesque figures out of medieval Japan, to whom a Westerner finds it hard to relate." Half a century later, Shindo's film remains breathtakingly modern, and absolutely relatable. Critic Chuck Stephens recently wrote, "As twist-of-fate face-offs go, the climax Shindo conjures up is a night-of-the-shrieking-souls showdown composed in couplets of pure pulp poetry, with desire pitted against terror and beauty eaten alive by repulsion, all of it capped by a ferocious final chortle into the void." Director: Kaneto Shindo Producer: Hisao Itoya Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo Cinematography: Kiyomi Kuroda Editor: Toshio Enoki Art Direction: Kaneto Shindo Music: Hikaru Hayashi Principal Cast: Nobuko Otowa (the mother), Jitsuko Yoshimura (the daughter-in-law), Kei Sato (Hachi), Taiji Tonoyama (Ushi, the merchant), Jukichi Uno (masked warrior) 102 minutes by Margarita Landazuri