Part sensual ghost story and part cautionary tale about profiteering from war, Ugetsu is a stunning film. The new DVD from Criterion lets you settle into the story without intrusion—the image looks balanced and consistent, from the famous scene where the peasant family crosses a billowy River Styx to the stark and startling murder of a mother with her son strapped to her back (you can compare several Ugetsu clips in the accompanying documentary to appreciate how thoroughly the film has been restored). After the movie was over, I left the DVD menu on repeat while I boiled water for tea, just to hear that keening, unsettling score a little longer.
Ugetsu was made by the renowned Japanese director Kenji Mizoguchi in 1953, and it concerns two families in a small village during the rampant civil wars of the 16th century. One couple is tragicomic: The pathetic and groveling husband wants to be a famous samurai, and his wife spends most of her time chasing him around and dragging him home. The other family is grimly flawed. Masayuki Mori plays a man who doesn't want to escape his trade so much as achieve transcendence through it, and he throws pots at a breakneck speed, hoping to sell his wares at war-inflated prices in the city. His wife (played by the great Mizoguchi muse Kinuyo Tanaka, who would become the first Japanese woman to direct a film in that same year) gently warns him to resist his greed. Neither husband pays heed, and soon the men are recklessly pursuing fame, wealth, and sex while their vulnerable wives wait behind.
The film then takes a turn toward a beautiful and erotically charged ghost narrative, inspired by the Akinari Ueda story "A Serpent's Lust" (from an 18th-century collection that gives its name to the film). An upper-class enchantress praises the potter's work, plies him with sake, and then demands that he marry her. Powerless to resist an aristocrat's flattery and sexual allure, he consents. Meanwhile, life in the distant village goes on its tragic way.
Once you—and the potter—are released from Ugetsu's spell, there's time to analyze the experience, and that's where Criterion's impeccably packaged box set comes in. This DVD is drowning in documentation, not all of it enthralling (did we really need a partial Spanish-language trailer?), but much of it extremely interesting. There are delicate interviews in which Tanaka denies Mizoguchi was in love with her (she says he fell for her characters), and others where Mizoguchi's coworkers euphemistically describe how his wife succumbed to syphilis-related mental illness. Tony Rayns supplies a thoroughly researched commentary track, packed with social and historical context. And perhaps best of all, the set includes the three stories on which the film was based: Guy de Maupassant's "How He Got the Legion of Honor" and Akinari Ueda's "The House in the Thicket" and "A Serpent's Lust," the latter two in new and lovely translations. 
