Deep River / Fukai kawa (1995)

The Deep River of the title is the Ganges, but it is also the deep river of spirituality and faith. Based on the last novel by Shusaku Endo, it follows four major characters on a visit to Varanasi, a holy city to Hindus, Muslims, and also to Buddhists as the site of the Buddha’s first sermon, as well as the site on the Ganges where Hindu bathe for spiritual renewal and scatter the ashes of the dead in the water. While it certainly has its opportunity to be a travelogue, especially with the extended Indian dancer’s scene in the hotel bar, the Japanese religious connection to the site through Buddhism makes it much different from the European perception of Renoir’s The River or the early Merchant-Ivory films set in India.

On the tour bus we meet four very different characters. Sanjyo is the stereotyped Japanese tourist taking pictures of everything. He actually has a goal, hoping to build a portfolio that will make him a career back in Japan, but he and his young wife will eventually serve only as a plot contrivance to reach the finale and as a contrast to the other three – Isobe, a salaryman, Mitsuko, a divorcee, and Kiguchi, an old retiree. Each of these three has a different but very serious reason related to religion for making the journey, which we see in flashbacks.

Isobe’s wife died from a brain tumor, but she made him promise to look for her in her reincarnated new life. He has corresponded with an American university studying people who seem to remember another life. They have identified a young girl in a village near Varanasi who seems to remember a previous Japanese life and Isobe wants to find her and find out if she is in fact his reincarnated wife.

The elderly Kiguchi by accident had met Tsukada, his old commander during the Japanese attempt to invade India in 1945. Another officer had committed suicide and Tsukada had eaten part of him, which gave him the strength to survive and to save Kiguchi when the latter was trapped in mud, but he has never forgiven himself for the cannibalism, particularly after he met the officer’s wife. Despite a successful business career, Tsukada has spent fifty years trying to drink himself to death. After Tsukada’s death, Kiguchi believes the guilt has been passed on to him, and thus hopes the pilgrimage will at last set his old commander’s spirit at rest.

The bulk of the movie, however, concerns Mitsuko. As a university student, she had been quite a bitch and a temptress who on a bet had seduced Otsu, a devout and very shy Catholic.

She gives him a choice of her body or his “kneeling down club,” and he chooses her. Afterward, she of course dumps him and he disappears. After graduation, she has an arranged marriage that eventually as part of her husband’s business takes her to Lyon in France, where Otsu has gone to prepare for the priesthood. They meet and talk, and then separate again, though they correspond until he is sent to India. After her divorce, she has come to search for him, the one person in her life about whom she has felt genuinely guilty.

Otsu when found has either left the Church or been defrocked (it’s not quite clear) and is living in absolute poverty, ministering to the poorest of the poor like Mother Teresa without an actual building, taking people who are dying or dead in the streets to the ghats by the river to be cremated. Though intensely devout, he was never able to accept the Christian concept of Good and Evil, seeing life through the Buddhist lens of his own country where souls are in continual transition and all actions are complex. In a way, he is trying to reconcile the Buddhist tradition in which there is no God per se by finding a God who cares for everyone equally. That is of course a theological simplification for purposes of summary, but their discussions, as well as her talks with Kiguchi, Isobe, and their very religious Hindu tour guide, make this an intellectual pilgrimage as well as an emotional one.

Not everyone finds happiness, as we might expect. Nevertheless, Mitsuko decides to put on a sari and bathe in the Ganges herself, like a Hindu woman, which turns into an ecstatic experience for her.

Tsukada is Toshiro Mifune’s last screen appearance, extremely frail and recognizable primarily by his voice. Perhaps because of his Alzheimer’s, his dialogue is limited and much of the character’s emotional history is left to his wife to explain.

Toshiro Mifune

Unfortunately, the only copy I have been able to find on the internet is a letterboxed version from a VHS original, as you can see from the captures, and in the course of the uploading the dialogue gradually loses sync with the lips. With subtitling this is not a serious problem, just a bit irritating, and the fansubs themselves are unusually helpful with all the different languages and concepts involved.

Kumai is a very serious film-maker, willing to take on topics that others avoid, and this is certainly worth searching out, both for its insights into all of the Eastern religions and for its sincerity and integrity. The second of three movies Kumai would make based on an Endo work, it is one of the very rare movies about religion of any kind that treats its subject and its believers with dignity and complexity.