‘Mountain Woman’: Tokyo Review

Dir: Takeshi Fukunaga. Japan, USA. 2022. 97mins

Late 18th century, Tohoku, on Japan’s Honshu Island. A small village skulking in the shadow of a mountain is blighted by a famine caused by two years of failed crops. Rin (Anna Yamada) and her family have it tougher than most. A generational shame impacts on their status, they are despised but necessary – they do the jobs that nobody else will do. Selfless Rin takes the blame for yet another of her family’s crimes, then flees to the mountain where, for a while at least, she finds peace. But then the village hauls her back, with the very worst of intentions. This mythic tale of female oppression, of the clashing duality of humanity versus nature, is accomplished and moodily atmospheric, if somewhat bleak and lacking in the emphatic pay off that a fable of this kind tends to require.

Accomplished and moodily atmospheric, if somewhat bleak

This is the third feature from Takeshi Fukunaga. His first feature film, Out of My Hand, premiered in Berlin’s Panorama, before winning the US Best Fiction Award at the LA Film Festival and scoring an Independent Spirit Award nomination; his second, Ainu Mosir, won the Special Jury Prize in International Narrative Competition at Tribeca Film Festival. Mountain Woman is a high quality production, with Alex Zhang Hungtai’s score – all feral strings and seismic rumbles – a particular standout. As such, it should travel within the festival circuit, but the downbeat themes might prove to be a challenging prospect for distributors.

Fukunaga brings home the sheer desperation of life in this starving, sunless corner of Japan with one of the most grimly effective opening sequences of the year. A woman, tended by a midwife, moans her way through labour in a modest hut. Outside, her husband is alerted to the birth of his child by a thin cry. There’s a weariness in his face as he enters the hut, takes the newborn in his arms and smothers it, despite his wife’s single pleading cry. “We have nothing to feed it,” he reminds her. 

Outside, waiting at a respectful distance, is Rin. One of the more unpleasant tasks which falls to her family is the disposal of the bodies of newborns. The grieving mother shoots her a look of such hatred, it’s almost as though she holds Rin solely responsible for the death. 

Rin accepts her miserable lot unquestioningly. When Taizo (Ryutaro Ninomiya), a courier who moves goods from village to village, offers to take her with him on the next trip, she demurs. Her fate in life is one of self-sacrifice, her role is to care for her disabled brother and raging, impulsive father. But for one moment when she offers herself physically in return for safety, Rin is the kind of saintly, uncomplaining female character who was favoured by Carl Theodor Dreyer. And there’s a parallel with Joan of Arc in the fate that the villagers, desperate to appease the weather God, have in mind for her.

In this community starved of sun, the light is subdued and soft. But cinematographer Daniel Satinoff finds beauty within the unrelenting gloom. And perhaps that’s the crux of the film – Rin, pure of heart, is the one chink of light in the darkness that consumes the villagers along with their hunger. It’s telling that her one glimpse of happiness is living alongside a taciturn man regarded as a savage and known to the locals as Mountain Man; about as far away from ‘civilisation’ as it’s possible to get.