Sansho the Bailiff

Mizoguchi's cruellest film, taken from a 1911 short story by Mori Ogai. In medieval Japan, the wife and two children of an exiled governor set out to reach him. On the road they are betrayed: the mother is sold to an island, the children handed as slaves to the estate of a bailiff named Sansho. Over the years Zushio hardens into cruelty to protect himself, while his sister Anju holds on to their father's counsel. Anju's death is one of the quietest suicides in cinema: she walks into a lake, the surface closes, and the camera watches the ripples settle. Kinuyo Tanaka plays the mother, Kyoko Kagawa is Anju and Yoshiaki Hanayagi is Zushio. It took the Silver Lion at Venice in 1954, sharing the prize that year with On the Waterfront, Seven Samurai and La Strada. The last scene is on a beach, and as it ends the camera drifts off the reunited mother and son to frame a man gathering seaweed. Mizoguchi does not end the suffering, he simply moves it out of the frame. Who it is for: viewers who love classical Japanese cinema and stories built on the cost of mercy. Who it is not for: anyone with a low tolerance. It contains child slavery, branding and forced prostitution, and the only reward offered is the reunion at the end, which is itself only half a reunion.