Bunuel1976 Review of Humanity and Paper Balloons

Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937)

HUMANITY AND PAPER BALLOONS (Sadao Yamanaka, 1937) ***

[7/10 · 3 February 2009]

The last film of its young director Sadao Yamanaka - who died the following year at just 28 years of age while serving with the Japanese army in China; actually, this film's R2 DVD release some years ago under Eureka's "Masters Of Cinema" label was the first I have ever heard of him at all (although this same film was subsequently shown on late-night Italian TV). HUMANITY AND PAPER BALLOONS concerns the lives of the inhabitants of a slum tenement and is, by necessity, reminiscent of Akira Kurosawa's later Japanese transposition of Maxim Gorky's THE LOWER DEPTHS (1957). The main protagonists are a married, alcoholic ronin seeking repeatedly but vainly to be employed by an ex-protégé (now wealthy) of his father's and a wily crook who takes revenge on his tormentor (for keeping a gambling joint) by kidnapping the latter's intended. The film - which starts and ends with a suicide – is very sensitively handled throughout, belying Yamanka's youth and revealing him to be as much a forgotten master Japanese film-maker as Tomu Uchida (which I also experienced for the first time earlier this year after my equally recent discovery of him). There have been rumors online of this film being in the pipeline for a future Criterion DVD release but, in spite of its undeniable artistic merits, personally I am satisfied with the edition currently available.