Directed by Shohei Imamura
Written by Shohei Imamura and Koji Numata
Adapted from a novel by Akiyuki Nozaka
Cinematography by Shinsaku Himeda
Edited by Matsuo Tanji
Art Directed by Hiromi Shiozawi and Ichiro Takada
Music by Toshiro Mayuzumi
Produced by Shohei Imamura, Jiro Tomoda, and Issei Yamamoto
Starring
Shoichi Ozawa as Subu
Sumiko Sakamoto as Haru
Keiko Sakawa as Keiko
Masaomi Kondo as Koichi
. . .
"I thought an orgy would cheer me up."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
Subu is an Osaka-based pornographer-pimp-orgy-booker-aphrodisiac-peddler. He shoots fuck flicks. He arranges private screenings. He writes and self-publishes dirty books. Subu has busted his ass cultivating a clientele of middle-aged businessmen looking to purchase boner pills of dubious provenance. Subu has a relationship with a madam who provides him with sex workers who can play the ever in-demand role of Eternal Virgin for married men in need of escape from their wives. He arranges orgies and group gropes. Subu might be a sleazebag in our oh-so-pristine eyes, but he's never short of clients. He'd tell you that he fills a vital social need by providing relief to sexually repressed patriarchs. Subu's grind is relentless even as he's hassled by gangsters and cops. For all the shit he has to put up with you'd think he would just get a regular job. Fragmentary flashbacks suggest he was sexually abused as a child, which may account for his outlaw tendencies.
To be clear, The Pornographers is a rigorously un-sexy film. It is about the manufacture of certain kinds of fantasies, but we never see finished products. Pleasure is fleeting, if not just out of reach. Subu is devoted to his various smutty gigs, yet also a moralizing hypocrite when convenient. What we see of the making of porn is procedural almost to the point of tedium, relieved only by the grotesque follies of seeing amateurs blunder through gauntlets of cringe. Subu's on-camera talent is recruited in an entirely ad hoc fashion, usually based on sizes of genitalia, willingness to disrobe, willingness to work cheap etc. Subu has a couple of other guys who function as his crew and post-production staff, and that's about it. Subu's market is pretty much exclusively male and heterosexual. The kinkiest his movies get is a spit roast involving two guys and a girl, and one of the guys is an American. The fact that all of this is conveyed obliquely is a testament both to the cleverness of the direction and the stupefying banality of so much pornographic material. Even one of Subu's fellow pornographers professes his exclusive interest in masturbation which, especially in this context, suggests a triumph of imagination and self-sufficiency. By contrast, Subu's past trauma has, perhaps, made him ill-at-ease inside his own mind.
Subu's personal life is both a disaster zone and about as perverse as one would expect from a Shohei Imamura film. Subu's banging his landlady, Haru, who carries a torch for her dead husband whom she believes has reincarnated as a carp. This holy carp lives in a fishtank in Haru's bedroom, often observing her during coitus with Subu. Haru has a creepy incest thing going with her teenage son, Koichi. Haru beats herself up over her lack of faithful widowhood, and We the Audience get to watch as she devolves into insanity. Meanwhile, Subu attempts to seduce Haru's teenage daughter, Keiko. You see, much like that popular car crashing franchise, it's all about family.
The Pornographers frames its action in widescreen black and white consisting of highly expressive shadows and gritty location shooting. Often the camera is positioned at a distance, like we're private eyes or secret morality police surveilling the characters, taking notes, building dossiers. The style and tone swings from grimy bathroom sink naturalism to bleak-ass comedy of cruelty to expressionistic nightmare mode. One bravura yet borderline inexplicable longshot involves two people speaking in the foreground while a woman approaches us from the deep background of an ominously long hallway. As the woman draws near, the reality of the film transitions from quotidian drama to erotic fantasy. Imamura crosses the borderline between objective sociology and subjective psychoanalysis with aplomb.
The Pornographers takes a huge leap into grotesque satire in its final scenes as Subu becomes totally disillusioned with his life, his profession, Reality Its Own Self. Some of the last shots involve a diminutive houseboat adrift among huge cargo freighters. Subu's porno-grind has seemingly mutated beyond the bounds of outlaw capitalism and into the realms of blue sky research and development. Subu goes from being a rigorously disturbing Imamura protagonist to becoming something like an Edogawa Rampo villain. It might even be a kind of piss-take on that sort of thing. Admittedly, Subu's innovations seem quaint by today's standards, but for 1966 the dude was definitely getting high on his own supply. Watching that houseboat drift away, it's hard not to see it as a happy ending for a deeply troubled man. Subu might make your skin crawl, Dear Reader, but he existed as a kind of vanishing mediator of heterosexual dysfunctions and disillusionments. One Subu floats free, and no doubt another Subu'll rotate into position . . . and then, in the fullness of time, along comes the Internet . . .
