High praise from virtually all the other reviewers on this board, and they make their points exceedingly well, but for me, this was a slow and mournful film telling a bleak story of senior citizens approaching the age of seventy and expected to end their lives on a mountain top. The grim aspects of the movie are given further resonance with doleful strumming and insistent drumming as part of the soundtrack. The circumstances of two elderly villagers are highlighted, one the old granny Orin (Kinuyo Tanaka) who has a conflicted relationship with members of her family, and the old man Mata (Seiji Miyaguchi), who resists all attempts at honoring the tradition of his fellow villagers to willingly submit to ostracism and death. So belligerent is Mata's son (Yûnosuke Itô), that his journey to Narayama and ultimate fate is personally delivered with a death dealing blow that sends Mata over a cliff. The story's theme is a sad tradition of 'obasute', or the abandonment of old people, which in fact finds it's sad way across all nationalities to some degree or another. A degree of patience is required to sit through the film, as many of the characters are unlikable, and it's resolution leaves little hope of satisfaction or fulfillment.
Review of The Ballad of Narayama
