New Picture

Ugetsu (Daiei). Five Japanese films have won grand prizes at International Film Festivals in Cannes and Venice since the war: Rashomon was the first to be shown in this country; Ugetsu is the second, and in many ways it is a jewel of intenser ray than Rashomon. Rashomon was orgiastic, almost Western in its rage for the things of the world. Ugetsu is contemplative in the midst of violence, wholly Oriental in its lidded introspection. As a result, its beauty and its meaning are more remote from Western audiences, but not too remote.

The story of Ugetsu comes from a Japanese classic, written in 1768 by Akinari Ueda. In the closing years of the 16th century, in a time of civil war, a country potter sees his chance to get rich quick selling pots in the city at war-inflated prices. The trip to the city, through a countryside full of marauding soldiery, is insanely dangerous. Halfway, the potter sends his wife and son back home alone. In town the pottery sells merrily, but no sooner is the money in hand than the potter begins to dream of luxury.

All at once the beautiful Lady Wakasa, attended by a dark old woman, appears, and asks him to bring some pottery to her house. He follows. She brings him tea; she offers him love. He cannot resist. "I never imagined such pleasures existed!" he cries. "You are my slave," she murmurs. At long last, a Buddhist priest frees the potter from her spell, and he turns back homeward. When he reaches home, he finds his wife dead. Only her spirit is there to comfort him, saying, "Go back to work."

Ugetsu is intended not as a story of real life, but as a fateful legend of the soul. Therefore, the actors keep closer than they did in Rashomon to the old symbolic style. If the greedy peasants grunt and draggle their arms like apes, it is not to say that the Japanese ever did so in real life, but rather that they assumed such attitudes in their hearts. In these terms, the painted mincing of the Lady Wakasa (Machiko Kyo, the rape victim in Rashomon), the snuffling animality of the potter (Masayuki Mori, the husband in Rashomon), the abstract dutifulness of the potter's wife satisfy the spectator as keenly as gestures in a well-made ballet.

The introverted mood of the picture is uncannily enhanced by the musical score. The cold, otherworldly picking of the samisen snips the threads of reality one by one, and the audience floats free among music that tries to express the intimate noises of the toiling spirit. The photography never once permits this mood to falter. Even the most violent scenes are dissolved in a meditative mist, like terrors in the mind of a sage. The moviegoer has the sense of living in a classic Japanese watercolor or of walking on a world that is really a giant pearl.

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