The Ballad of Narayama
NR, 128 min.
Directed by Shohei Imamura, Narrated by , Voices by , Starring Ken Ogata, Sumiko Sakamoto.

This final film in the Imamura series is a winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Imamura’s version of the famous Narayama tale was condemned as pornographic and is full of fierce pageantry. The story concerns a man from an impoverished village compelled by tradition to carry his aged mother to the top of a mountain and leave her to die of starvation and exposure.

This article appears in December 10 • 1999.

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Marjorie Baumgarten is a film critic and contributing writer at The Austin Chronicle, where she has worked in many capacities since the paper's founding in 1981. She served as the Chronicle's Film Reviews editor for 25 years.