Teinosuke Kinugasa, working with the pioneering Eastmancolor (developed by Daiei, which wanted its own weapon to compete), uses color to sculpt an emotional psychodrama directly on the screen. The orange of the soldiers' tunics is the color of flame, of obsessive desire. The blue of the night is the color of frost, of the death of the soul.

It is impossible to watch Jigokumon without being mesmerized by its surface. It is a film that lives and dies on its aesthetics. Each shot is composed with the precision of an emakimono, an ancient Japanese painted scroll. Depth of field is often eliminated, backgrounds are panels of pure color, and the costumes (which won a well-deserved Oscar) are chromatic armor that define the character even before they speak. There is not a thread out of place, not a speck of “realistic” dust. Kinugasa creates a hermetic world, a Heian period (we are in the 12th century, during the Heiji rebellion) that never existed, except in the collective imagination of classical Japanese art.

The plot, in its essence, is a tragedy of brutal simplicity, worthy of an opera libretto. During the rebellion, the samurai Morito (Kazuo Hasegawa, who balances stoicism and latent madness) saves the life of a court lady, Kesa (the divine Machiko Kyō). As a reward for his heroism, Lord Kiyomori offers him anything he desires. Morito, infatuated with the woman, asks for her hand in marriage. There is only one insurmountable problem: Kesa is already happily married to Wataru (Isao Yamagata), a samurai in the imperial guard. The refusal, however polite, only fuels Morito's obsession. What was once a desire becomes a demand, and the demand becomes a pathology that will engulf everyone.

The film is a head-on collision between giri (social duty, honor) and ninjo (human passion, desire). But unlike many jidaigeki (historical dramas), here ninjo is not romantic; it is toxic. Morito's obsession is not love, it is a selfish virus. It is the chaos of the individual trying to tear apart the perfectly composed fabric of society. Kinugasa visualizes this conflict masterfully. The court world is all rituals, pastel colors, slow and controlled movements. Morito's irruption, with its bright colors and repressed energy, is an ink stain on a rice parchment.

The comparison with the cinema of Powell and Pressburger is fascinating. If Black Narcissus (1947) used Technicolor to paint the hysteria and sexual repression in a Himalayan convent, Jigokumon uses Eastmancolor to paint the psychological disintegration of a man within an inflexible social structure. The hell of the title is not an otherworldly place with demons and flames; it is Morito's mind. It is the hell of the hypertrophic ego that does not accept “no.” The “Gate of Hell” is the threshold Morito crosses when his legitimate desire (the reward) becomes an illegitimate claim (another man's wife).

But the film ultimately belongs to Machiko Kyō. Fresh from the global success of Rashomon (1950), where she played the ambiguous and wild victim/seductress, here Kyō performs a miracle of subtraction. Her Kesa is not a femme fatale. Nor is she a passive victim. She is the embodiment of giri. She is a woman whose loyalty to her husband is so absolute, so pure, that it becomes a force of nature, as unyielding as Morito's obsession. Her composure is her armor. Faced with Morito's increasingly desperate threats (he even threatens to kill her family), Kesa does not break down. She plans.

The film's climax is one of the most chilling and formally perfect sequences in cinema history. Kesa, seemingly defeated, pretends to give in to Morito. She offers him a terrible deal: she will help him kill her husband Wataru in his sleep, so that she can be “freely” his. Kinugasa orchestrates the nighttime murder scene with a mastery that puts Hitchcock to shame. The use of shadows, sliding panels (fusuma), silence broken only by the chirping of crickets. Morito creeps in the darkness, guided by his murderous lust, and strikes the sleeping figure.

The revelation that Kesa has taken her husband's place, sacrificing herself to save her husband's honor and, in a sense, to “punish” Morito by condemning him to his own guilt, is pure Greek tragedy. It is an act of extreme will, a suicide by proxy that preserves the social order at the highest price. Morito's reaction is not (only) horror; it is annihilation. His obsession, deprived of its object, collapses in on itself.

When Wataru, having discovered the corpse, spares the life of a now catatonic Morito, he does so not out of mercy, but because he understands that death would be a release. The real hell is living with the knowledge of what one has done. And so, Jigokumon closes with the most powerful image: Morito, shaved bald, walking toward exile as a Buddhist monk, away from the gate that gives the film its title. It is not redemption. It is perpetual damnation. It is the condemnation to live forever in the void left by one's own destructive desire.

Jigokumon is a total work of art. It is a film that is admired for its almost unbearable beauty even before one understands its cruelty. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and an Oscar, and opened the door to a wave of Japanese color cinema, but few have matched its formal audacity.