In one of the oddest starring roles in history, Susumu Terajima slowly emerges from the shadows beside a railroad track and walks through a series of strange encounters without saying a word until at last he goes off screen and tries to tell his wife what happened to him. Writer/director Sabu had used the structure of a trip through a day or two from his first film Non-Stop, which found a store owner chasing a thief across Tokyo, and continuing in Postman Blues, which follows a day that goes wrong for a mailman, in Monday, in which a man goes to a funeral on Saturday which leads him to his death on Monday morning, and in Drive, where a man goes for a drive and a gang of bank robbers commandeer his car. Blessing Bell, however, finds him in a more contemplative mode.
Terajima walks past a group of men who have arrived for work only to find the factory closed. A yakuza starts talking to him, only to drop dead from a knife wound. Arrested for the killing, he meets another prisoner who has killed his wife’s lover. When released at night, he passes a burning building from which he rescues a child. Given a police commendation, he is hit by a car and ends up in hospital next to a dying old man. Going to the old man’s home, he finds the old wife has also died, holding a winning lottery ticket. He cashes that in, only to have the money later stolen. He meets a salaryman who jumps off the bridge. He stops for a drink and overhears a man arguing about a bill and another man with cancer, then walks some more in the dark until he falls into a hole near the beach. When morning comes, he gets out and contemplates the ocean while the sun rises behind him, then starts retracing his steps, gradually running until he returns home.
A structure that had been a gimmick for action and off-beat comedy in Sabu’s earlier movies is now used for a spiritual journey of some kind, but precisely what kind is never explained. Everything is a matter of Chance, the name of the bar where he observes the prisoner’s wife trying to pick up another man. We don’t know why he started on his walk; from his clothes, he may have been simply walking to work, though the factory itself seems to have been out of use for some time and losing his job is the one thing he doesn’t mention when he at last returns home. Nor do we know what he learns during the night in his hole, when he finally cries while contemplating the stars, because he never says a word. People talk to him, but he doesn’t say anything in return. We only know that, once he decides to head back home after his two nights away, he is in a hurry to get there.
All his meetings are related to social malaise and to death in some way. One factory worker tries to kill himself but is prevented by his mates while the salaryman on the bridge succeeds, both because they have lost their jobs. The mother of the child he rescues talks about her previous desires to kill herself, because the life of a single mother is too hard for her.
The old man in the hospital and his wife are dying or already dead. The man with cancer wants to drink himself to death instead. At the prison, a yakuza gang is waiting for their boss, who is immediately shot down while Terajima is passing. We don’t know who stabbed the earlier yakuza or why, nor do we know if the old man in the hospital was real or a ghost. Nor do we ever see or hear the bell in the title. Things just happen, not to but around Terajima.
After a while, we may even begin to doubt that Terajima himself is even real. It is almost as if he is a presence that allows others to fully express their deepest concerns. They simply feel the urge to talk to him, without any attempt on his part to make a connection. He is not quite the stone face of Takeshi Kitano, but there are no smiles until the end, no nods of agreement, no hints of his personal feelings. He is not so much inexpressive as impassive. He does not even seem particularly confused by what happens, but eventually he seems to have been profoundly affected.
The people he meets reflect many of the issues to be found in other Japanese films of the time – how the loss of a job is the same as loss of life, the emptiness of both the salaryman and the yakuza life, the loneliness of the single mother, the old couple desperate to be reunited in the afterlife. We see a man unable to pay his bar tab because of hard economic times, and a man in a suit on a bench reading the want-ads while a scavenger lurks to grab his drink can for recycling. There is a dry humor about many of the scenes, and some in-jokes referencing his earlier movies, but no blatant jokes or pratfalls.
Unlike Sabu’s earlier films, everything moves at walking speed, with much of the film simply composed of traveling shots alongside or directly in front of Terajima as he walks. These are almost always filmed on the horizontal. Shots of Terajima when he is still are almost always frontal, much like a Kitano movie. (The long walk and the stories evinced as the walker passes may suggest Dolls in particular, released barely a month earlier.) In one shot of almost two minutes, the static camera simply waits outside the building where he has gone to cash in the lottery ticket until he comes out.
Within that style, Masao Nakabori’s photography provides some gorgeous still lifes and compositions on a par with his work in Maborosi or his films for Jissoji. No music tells us how to feel, for we hear only ambient sound until a lone guitar begins to play as he starts back toward home.
Terajima is one of those Japanese actors who seems to be in everything, but usually in a supporting role. Here he is in every scene, but the other characters get the monologues. He is simply the man who walks away, then eventually runs back.
Japanonfilm 