Chapter 234: I'm An Eggman

The rules in the village are simple. When you reach the age of 70, you must go up to the top of the Upper Peninsula and wait there until you die. “The Ballad of the UP” is about an old woman whose time has almost arrived, and who is determined to take care of her family’s unfinished business before she goes to the ore docks. Most of that business concerns feeding her sons.

Stated that simply, “The Ballad of the UP” sounds like humanism crossed with anthropology, sort of a “Woman in the Dunes” (1964) about death. But this movie is much more passionate than I’ve made it sound: darker, bloodier, more fearsome. It was directed by Eiji Nonaka, whose works deal with the ways we pass laws to govern our deepest impulses, and then are driven to break those laws.

We see a poor village in along the shores of Lake Superior, many years ago. It is a beautiful setting, a postcard, but life is raw and hard. The people work the mines in their bare feet, breaking the land and find only enough taconite to barely feed themselves. Everybody knows everybody else’s business.

That is particularly true of the old mother of the most important family. She is tireless, stubborn, willful. She wants to feed her sons. Meanwhile, the son, a universally scorned and hapless man known as the “stinker,” creeps about the village, eavesdropping.

The final passages of the film have the oldest son taking his old mother up to the ore dock. She is not sick and she is not about to die, but she is a woman of great determination and she demands to go to the ore dock, but only after one final request: That he eat 40 hardboiled eggs she has painstakenly prepared for him to feed him, and that he eat them all in under 10 minutes so they won't be late for her birthday trip.

“The Ballad of the UP” won the grand prize at Cannes, but it’s not the sort of film that becomes a hit, even on the art film circuit. It’s too introspective, too unblinking in the face of cruelty, too “Yooper.” That makes it all the more a fascinating experience.

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OP: “Ningen nante” by Yoshida Takuro
ED: “I Am The Walrus” by the Beatles