Masahiro Shinoda – Hanare goze Orin AKA Ballad of Orin (1977)
Orin (Shima Iwashita) is a blind woman in the early 20th century who as a young girl became a goze, or itinerant entertainer, one of the few options available to women like her in Japan at the time (one of the others was to be a prostitute). Orin’s life is largely miserable, her misery the result of traditionalist attitudes, but she never grasps that her society is punishing her merely for the twin crimes of being a woman and disabled.
Orin is exiled from her troupe for moral lapses, and wanders the road on her own until she bands together with a deserter from a war Japan is fighting in Siberia (Yoshio Harada). The pair forge a curiously celibate partnership as they tour the countryside trying to keep out of the way of the various parties wanting to do them harm…
Ed Howard on Only the Cinema wrote:
This is a complex and powerful film, stunning in its steady accumulation of imagery and the tragic commentary of its narrative. Shinoda handles this potentially didactic material with remarkable delicacy, never allowing it to become a heavy-handed “message” film. Its messages are always contained organically by the story, and by the character of Orin, who’s played with wonderful range and quiet intensity by Iwashita (Shinoda’s wife, incidentally). Her performance encompasses strength, despair, sensuality, loneliness, and mystery, and she’s a wonderfully sensitive actress for depicting the emotional subtleties of this tale…This is a truly masterful film, filled with multiple layers and multiple meanings; its placid surface is deceiving.
Hanare.goze.Orin.AKA.Ballad.of.Orin.1977.DVDRip.x264-HANDJOB.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1 h 58 min
Size: 1.70 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 720x480 ~> 720x540
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 1 866 kb/s
BPP: 0.225
Audio
#1: Japanese 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s
Language(s):Japanese
Subtitles:English (srt, default); Russian (idx/VobSub); Japanese (idx/VobSub)
