The latter is out of favor within the government due to his support for the peasants against the interests of the slaveowner wealthy. He decides the situation is too dangerous for this family, so he sends them on a dubious journey to his homeland. They are soon kidnapped and sold into slavery.
Tamaki is forced into prostitution, and is separated from her children, who are held at a manor run by the merciless and crafty Sansho (Eitarô Shindô). Sansho is opposed only by his outspoken grown son Taro (Akitake Kôo).
Some ten years pass, and Zushio and Anju are now adults. They plan an escape, which succeeds for Zushio (Yoshiaki Hanayagi). But Anju (Kyôko Kagawa) meets a tragic end. Zushio finds refuge at a nearby monastery where Taro is top man.
Zushio decides to petition the emperor's chief advisor. Against all odds, the advisor hears the petition, and in an outlandish outcome, is so moved that he appoints Zushio as governor of Sansho's province, with Norimura (Nazukimi Okuni) as his efficient right hand man.
Zushio makes the daring decree to free all the slaves in his region, which puts him at odds with Sansho. Because it is a movie, the conflict is resolved in Zushio's favor, without loss of life.
His mission accomplished, Zushio resigns and without attendants leaves in search of his long-lost mother Tamaki. But she is now elderly and crippled from punishments inflicted for attempts at running away from her slave master.
How others will see it. Sansho the Bailiff won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival and often shows up on critics' polls for best film. At imdb.com, it has a reasonable 6K user votes with a very high average grade of 8.3. However, there is a decline with advancing age, from 8.6 under 40 to 6.9 over 45. Women over 45 give it just 4.3 out of 10.
Presumably, younger and male audiences find it moving, while older and female audiences merely consider it depressing.
How I felt about it. Some would say that the characters are allegorical. I prefer to take them as presented. Our heroes, the four members of Zushio's family, are more or less perfect throughout, except for two consecutive scenes where the grown Zushio appears cynical and obedient to Sansho. Taro also falls in the perfect category.
On the villain side of the ledger, we have Sansho and the various corrupt governors who care not a whit about human suffering. Injustice is the theme of the movie.
Many plot events are incredulous. Zushio's father, who must have some savings, sends his naive wife and two underaged children on a dangerous adventure unaccompanied except for an aged female servant. It seems unlikely that Taro would continually to openly oppose Sansho. It is also unlikely he would later run an Imperial temple, when in real life (as opposed to reel life) he would wait to take over his father's position.
When Zushio escapes from the manor, he would not take the dying invalid Namiji (Noriko Tachibana) with him on his back. It would be wiser if Zushio and Anju ran away together and left Namiji behind. We wonder about Zushio's sudden change of personality from gruff advocate of Sansho to idealistic slave freer. You'd think he would search for his mother sooner rather than later.
We find it preposterous that a minister of the emperor would name the untrained, unproven Zushio to a post as lofty as governor, especially given Zushio's admitted desire to free the slaves, even on Sansho's manor. Further, we wonder why Tamaki appears to be eighty years old when she should be at most fifty. We also think that at some point she would stop pining over her lost children every single moment of every day. We wonder why, since Sansho has so many devoted samurai at his manor, none oppose his arrest.
In short, the story and characters are unconvincing throughout. But we understand it to be some sort of allegory. Slavery is bad, life is not fair, sacrifice is a good thing. The first two are the sort of obvious truths that make impressionable viewers nod their heads in agreement. The third allegory is troublesome in that sacrifice is often a waste, and there may be a better (though more circuitous) path toward your goal.