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Burden of beauty, uncleasing fire. "A difficult catechism," its outcome brackets the tale, a callow arsonist in a police station. The novice monk (Ichikawa Raizo VIII) carries quite the psychological load, "a slight split personality" rooted in a fractured family and manifested in a persistent stutter. "When you learn you're alone and live in despair... words don't come easily." Dad was a provincial cuckold who saw the Golden Pavilion as a summit of purity in a debased world, the head priest (Nakamura Ganjiro II) takes over as shaky paternal figure, Mom (Tanie Kitabayashi) provides an unwelcome reminder of earthiness in supposedly hallowed ground. Nothing lovelier than temples to the neophyte, a limping colleague (Tatsuya Nakadai) begs to differ: "They're merely buildings that escaped bombing." Yukio Mishima's novel offers the site as a crux of reactionary aestheticism, Kon Ichikawa sees it as an embodiment of oppressive tradition and is happy to let it burn. Japan's postwar loner, handed a pack of Chesterfields by an American G.I. as reward for inadvertently terminating a geisha's bothersome pregnancy. Sloping roofs and tiled balconies, dissolving backgrounds for temporal shifts, a welter of hard lines entrapping the protagonist. (Ichikawa's canny articulation of the Daieiscope frame moves from intricate interiors to a seaside funeral procession and bustling views of Kyoto at night.) Tied Tongue and Club Foot stew in anguish and cynicism, the flower arranger sizes them up crisply: "Two crippled men talking nonsense." A matchstick flare kicks off the blaze, the upshot is the pagoda's upside-down reflection giving way to charred remains, the authorities mainly worry about the tourist trade. "Buddha's judgment." The kinship with Journal d'un Curé de Campagne surely was noted by Schrader in his own Mishima analysis. Cinematography by Kazuo Miyagawa. With Michiyo Aratama, Tamao Nakamura, Yoichi Funaki, Jun Hamamura, Yoko Uraji, Ryosuke Kagawa, and Kinzo Shin. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |