The Naked Island

THE NAKED ISLAND   ***1/2

Kaneto Shindo

1960

IDEA:  A peasant family living on a secluded island goes about its daily routines, laboring without the modern amenities available to those across the ocean.

BLURB:  On a primordial ur-island isolated from yet nestled in the archipelago of a modernizing 20^th-century Japan, the nameless protagonists of The Naked Island subsist, even as the tide of historical change and the elements themselves seem to render the conditions of their existence increasingly untenable. Yet they carry on, shouldering buckets of water up a cragged mountainside to irrigate their meager crops in a ritual that recalls the dignity-in-the-face-of-futility of Sisyphus. Shindo locates in their repetitive, enervating agricultural routine such a mythic allegory: a timeless fable of human labor, of enduring through life’s ineluctable struggles with determination and resilience despite the lack of discernible purpose or gain. The film’s effulgent images, which set the protagonists against boundless vistas of land and water, suggest a landscape as immortal as the human drama taking place within it. The Naked Island also, unavoidably, articulates a specific nationalist context, registering the losses and transformations of postwar Japan and offering a vision of social reality situated somewhere between propaganda and elegy. While it might be fair to wince at its depiction of agrarian existence as a reactionary lament for a more honorable primitive past, Shindo coarsens his romanticism with a palpable feel for the pain that permeated, and certainly continued to permeate in 1960, many aspects of Japanese life. The film is gorgeous, but it is also tough, disciplined, and often exhausting – a paean to human toil and tenacity that understands both as prerequisites for survival.