MOVIE REVIEW: THE PORNOGRAPHERS (1966)

 

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 . . .

MOVIE REVIEW: INTENTIONS OF MURDER (1964)

 

Directed by Shohei Imamura

Written by Keiji Hasebe and Shohei Imamura

From a novel by Shinji Fujiwara

Cinematography by Shinsaku Himoda

Edited by Mutsuo Tanji

Art Direction by Kimihiko Nakamura

Sound Recorded by Koshiro Jinbo

Music by Toshiro Mayuzumi

Produced by Masayuki Takagi and Jiro Tomoda

Starring

Masumi Harukawa as Sadako Takahashi

Ko Nishimura as Riichi Takahashi

Shigeru Tsuyuguchi as Hiraoka

Yuko Kusunoki as Yoshiko Masuda

. . .

"Oh no! The little mouse ate the big one. He must have been hungry."

. . .

Review by William D. Tucker.

You grow up in a rural part of Japan. You find out about the big city of Tokyo, and all that it has to offer: jobs with decent wages; exciting nightlife; access to culture and learning; the prospect of romance played out against city lights; escape from stifling traditions-

But, alas, you're just a poor girl from a poor family. You'll be spared none of the monstrosity inherent within the deeply misogynist culture that envelops you, that closes in to suffocate you, to crush you, to besiege you on all fronts-

Sadako is a poor girl from the countryside who finds herself in a kinda-sorta marriage to a college librarian named Riichi. They still live quite a ways out from Tokyo, so there's a daily commute involved, but the train system is strong and reliable, if noisy to those who live near the tracks. Sadako and Riichi live near the tracks. Which is probably fine by Riichi who gets off on yelling at and assaulting Sadako. The roar of the train covers up no end of intimate crimes. 

I say that Sadako and Riichi are in a 'kinda-sorta' marriage because while they go through the motions of being a hubby'n'wifey due to the specifics of Japan's family registry system-which I do not claim to fully grasp-Sadako has been denied full acceptance into Riichi's family. The point is that a complex tradition with a force of law behind it is used to ensnare Sadako in an oppressive relationship to Riichi. Riichi gets to make all sorts of patriarchal demands upon Sadako while also fucking around on her with his subordinate library colleague, Yoshiko, and maintain the fiction that he is a perfectly faithful husband. Meanwhile, Sadako is treated as a live-in domestic servant by Riichi and his family. 

Riichi is a thoroughly despicable, nagging, condescending pest of a man-child who demands total submission from Sadako. He's constantly bitching her out for minor transgressions, and demanding that she show him the receipts for various financial expenditures. Sadako is the manager of the household's finances, despite Riichi's nagging. Riichi also forces himself on Sadako sexually, even while demanding that she minister to his chronic asthma. Sadako functions as a live-in nurse to the malingering, abusive Riichi on top of everything else. Riichi's career as a librarian isn't so much about a love of knowledge as it is about the pursuit of status. Riichi comes from a rural farming family who lost most of their men to the war. Presumably, Riichi's asthma saved him from military service and, therefore, death in battle. 

As if this all weren't bad enough, a burglar named Hiraoka attacks Sadako in her home, and rapes her. And then this rapist develops a sick notion that he's actually in love with Sadako and that she should love him back. This rapist stalks her, and Sadako, fearing for her life, tries to appease him. She feels trapped by shame. She has no one she can trust. Sadako even attempts to end her life, but this does not go as planned. Sadako soldiers on through the endless ordeal of her days and nights. 

Intentions of Murder is a kind of horror film wherein the horror springs from perfectly real causes: tradition, misogyny, violent crime, rigid gender roles, loveless marriages, the drudgery of domestic labor, and the stifling lack of choices available to impoverished victims of abuse. The moody black and white widescreen cinematography offers not open vistas but rather shadowy overwhelming enclosures through which Sadako wanders, guided by an all-but-extinguished will to survive. Sadako never quite fights back, but neither does she totally sink beneath her heavy fate. She comes close to poisoning Hiraoka, but cannot bring herself to follow through. Sadako is not a figure of bloody vengeance. Intentions of Murder offers no spectacle of payback to the audience as relief from oppression. Sadako just isn't a violent person even if We the Audience root for her to retaliate against her tormentors. Much of what Riichi demands of her is sanctioned by the larger society which confers unjust advantages upon husbands over their wives. Moreover, Sadako herself has internalized this putrid status quo due to a complex mixture of poverty, community indifference, trauma, and lack of access to information and money. Sadako knows that she deserves a better life even as she adopts a devastating fatalism regarding her suffering.

Intentions of Murder exudes a smothering feeling of sinister fate that reminded me of the irresistible evil power at work in the movie Hereditary, but minus the supernatural. Like I said, it could be viewed as a sort of naturalist horror story. This naturalism is amplified by gritty location shooting accented with some eerie in-camera hallucination sequences as Sadako cracks up due to her traumas. 

Sadako does endure, though, despite the attacks from Riichi and Hiraoka. Whether she has any chance of escaping her situation is left ambiguous. Both of her tormentors are afflicted with serious health defects: Riichi's chronic asthma; Hiraoka seemingly steals to pay for heart medication. There's something approaching a Dick Tracy-esque moralistic logic at play here, wherein the villains have grotesque physical outer manifestations of inner failings, while our heroine, despite her descent into despair, retains a comparative vitality. These violent men are, ultimately, profoundly weak, and are only selected for survival by a bogus system of male supremacy-the same system that led the nation into a calamitous war, it should be noted. Sadako does start to earn some income as a seamstress by film's end, a task she has chosen for herself, but that's all we know for sure. In a world this cruel raw survival constitutes its own form of heroism.

MOVIE REVIEW: THE INSECT WOMAN (1963)

Starring
Sachiko Hidari as Tome Matsuki
Kazuo Kitamura as Chuji Matsuki
Jitsuko Yoshimura as Nobuko Matsuki
Masumi Harukawa as Midori
Tanie Kitabayashi as Madam Suma
Seizaburo Kawazu as Karasawa
Hiroyuki Nagato as Matsunami


Cinematography by Shinsaku Himeda
Edited by Mutsuo Tanji
Music by Toshiro Mayuzumi
Art Direction by Kimihiko Nakamura
Produced by Kano Otsuka and Jiro Tomoda
Written by Keiji Hasebe and Shohei Imamura
Directed by Shohei Imamura

...

"You've only seen the surface of happiness. I'll show you the real depths."

...

Review by William D. Tucker. 


Shohei Imamura's The Insect Woman documents the lifespan of an individual woman, Tome Matsuki, from the Winter of 1918 to the Spring of 1961. It starts with her birth, but does not end with her death. This is not a film that follows the usual tension-and-release formula of most dramas. There's no grand climax, ultimate triumph, or absolute defeat. Tome's life is not one that'll make the history books--she commanded no troops, she signed no treaties, she authored no great works of literature, nor did she found any great institutions or make any unique discoveries. It works in an elliptical fashion, providing a great density of detail about Tome's daily existence, and then switching tracks, taking Tome to a new phase of her life, and a new mass of detail and routine. The movie doesn't always make explicit how she gets from point A to point B in her life, and yet it's mostly clear how Tome's life evolves over time. The film is almost a scientific endeavor, with each scene being a representative sampling of the major events and decision points of Tome's existence.  The film goes against all the usual rules of cinematic storytelling, and yet, in doing so, it achieves an almost perfect sense of the drama of one person's life.

Tome Matsuki (Sachiko Hidari) was born to a family of tenant farmers in a rural village in Japan in 1918. Her first love is her slow-witted father, Chuji (Kazuo Kitamura), who starts sleeping with her when she's still a child. No one tells her that this is incest or that this relationship, by its nature, constitutes child abuse. Chuji himself may not even realize that what he's doing is wrong, as he seems to suffer from some sort of cognitive disability. Their love is not just disturbing, it's absolutely grotesque. When Tome matures into a young woman and has a child, Tome finds that her child will not suckle enough milk from her breasts. On the pretext of alleviating painfully swollen breasts, Chuji suckles the excess milk, and Tome takes sensual pleasure in the act.

Tome grows up, becomes a union organizer in a factory, but is pressured to return to the family's farm. She is constantly smothered by the presence of her family and their neighbors, and is obliged to use her body to get in good with the wealthier family that owns the land the Matsukis farm. She decides to leave the farm and makes her way to the big city, Tokyo, where she works for a spell as a maid for Midori (Masumi Harukawa) who is married to an American serviceman. Midori is pretty upfront with Tome about her mercenary motives for marrying an American. Midori sees the marriage as a potential opportunity to move up in the world, and if that means having a child she doesn't really want to keep her man around, then so be it.

Tome loses her job as a maid, and she finds herself scrubbing the floorboards of a brothel. Tome herself becomes a working girl and comes under the tutelage of a shrewd and tough madam (Tanie Kitabayashi) who is making a killing managing a stable of prostitutes. As a prostitute, Tome attracts the attention of an older businessman named Karasawa (Seizaburo Kawazu). Tome takes on the madam's role when the original is busted by the cops. Tome decides that the working girls need to take a more subtle approach to the trade, and so she urges them to take on a call girl business model. No more brothel. No more having all the prostitutes in one place where they can all be rounded up by cops looking for an easy bust. Now it's by appointment only with an approved list of customers. Tome proves perfectly capable of taking on the madam's role, and she even improves the business, making it just a bit more cop-proof.

All this time, Tome's daughter Nobuko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) has been growing up back on the farm, and enduring a sexual relationship with Chuji. This kind of romance, if you can call it that, seems to be a village institution. Nobuko at first seems to be following the same pattern of her mother's life, but Nobuko sees herself as starting some sort of co-operative farm of her own. She is more infused with the democratic spirit of the times, and wants to be a leader of the co-op and not just a submissive laborer. When she comes to the city to join her mother she is seeking investor funds to start up this venture, and this brings her into intimacy with the lecherous Karasawa, who is more than happy to ditch Tome for a younger woman.

Along the way, Tome's life, and its tiny scale, are measured against the world-historical events of the day: Hirohito's surrender; agrarian reforms imposed by the occupation government; riots and the discontent of the people at being under the thumb of a foreign power; and the struggles of a fallen imperial aggressor state to transform itself into an enterprising democracy. To what degree Japan achieves such a lofty goal is debatable. Tome's life is a kind of measure of this success, as she, herself, transforms with the times, taking on whatever role is necessary to survive and advance in society. Tome's daughter Nobuko is a further measure of Japan's ongoing evolution as a nation-state entity. The road out of the ruins of militarism is especially harsh on women coming from poor backgrounds, but they meet these challenges with vitality and pragmatism.

I have to admit, it was hard for me to watch this movie and not bring my own morality to bear in judging the characters and their relationships. I've sat through many films about macho characters using unlimited violence to slaughter paper tiger evildoers by the baker's dozen. And here I am getting uptight about depictions of incest and Karasawa's seduction of the much younger Nobuko. Like a lot of Americans, I can watch people getting shot, tortured, exploded, eviscerated, and all kinds of massacred, but I flinch when it comes to frank depictions of sexuality that fall outside of my own definitions of what is and is not normal.

I don't think this movie is promoting incest, or prostitution, or even May-September romances,  it is simply portraying life as it was lived by specific people in specific circumstances. Director Shohei Imamura is not letting himself off the hook via the usual dramatic and/or cinematic contrivances. There are no larger-than-life heroes framed against majestic backdrops, there is no great catharsis or display of mayhem to make the uncomfortable aspects of life go away, none of that adventure movie by schematic tension and release bullshit. The rhythm of this movie has more to do with how life is lived. People don't change because of sudden, melodramatic or spiritual insight, but rather they are molded, over time, by their families, societies, and individual personalities into who they are, what they might be, and what they eventually become.

MOVIE REVIEW: PIGS AND BATTLESHIPS (1961)

Starring
Hiroyuki Nagato as Kinta
Jitsuko Yoshimura as Haruko
Sanae Nakahara as Hiromi
Tetsuro Tamba as Tetsu
Kin Sugai as Hiromi's Mother
Eijiro Tono as Kinta's Father


Directed by Shohei Imamura
Produced by Kano Otsuka
Written by Hisashi Yamanouchi
Cinematography by Shinsaku Himeda
Lighting by Yasuo Iwaki
Sound by Fumio Hashimoto
Music by Toshiro Mayuzumi
Art Direction by Kimihiko Nakamura

Review by William D. Tucker. 


Pigs and Battleships is all about average people trying to survive and maybe even thrive in a port city in Japan sometime not long after the end of World War II. It's mostly about low end gangsters and their marginally more legit friends, lovers, and relations and how they navigate an economy heavily dependent on vice and the military presence of a foreign power. Everyone seems teetering on the edge of criminality, or maybe just insanity. Some dream big, and kid themselves that they'll have spacious homes like the foreign big spenders with their houses on hilltops, or maybe like the U.S. gangsters they see in newsreels.

Postwar Japan: the port city of Yokosuka. Big U.S. military presence. Lots of American sailors on the prowl, neon lights, prostitutes, and no air conditioning. Everybody is busting their ass to move up in the world, rebuild the nation, and, for the ladies, maybe even bag an American husband. But guys and gals alike all want some piece of that American dream. As one of the con men in this movie takes note, all the Japanese youth of the day are enamored with American gangsters and the Beat Generation, despite his best efforts to spread the gospel of Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson.

But if you can't be an American, you may as well profit off 'em. A young, wannabe yakuza named Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato) touts for a cathouse run out of the back of a tiny restaurant. With playful zest, he backslaps and browbeats the horny sailors into the cramped, smoky, improvised brothel space filled with bunk beds and young women. Kinta's girlfriend Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) works with her mother (Kin Sugai) and older sister, Hiromi (Sanae Nakahara), in the restaurant part of the operation, and occasionally gets a big pay day when she goes on dates with Americans. Haruko hasn't slept with any of these guys, yet, as she feels loyalty towards Kinta, but the pressure to do so is intense. Haruko's mom and Hiromi both want her to put out to increase the family's revenue. Haruko isn't necessarily put off by the idea of prostitution, but she's in love with Kinta, and she's beginning to grow tired of having other people tell her what to do. She sees herself as eventually saving up enough money to move herself and Kinta to Kawasaki, where the young couple could get jobs in one of the new factories being built there.

 But Kinta feels loyalty to his yakuza comrades. In particular, he is loyal to his direct boss, Tetsu (Tetsuro Tamba), who happens to be dating Haruko's sister, Hiromi. Tetsu is probably the most high strung yakuza in cinema history. He is constantly concerned for his health, and has a medievalist's approach to medicine. Tetsu monitors the color and volume of the bile he coughs up every morning. Tetsu and Kinta and other members of their gang decide to move away from narcotics trafficking, and to focus on a scheme to sell pork to the American military base. To that end they decide to focus their business on pig farming and prostitution, with supplementary forays into protection racketeering. But these dimwitted yakuza find their ambitions complicated by the machinations of other criminals and distrust and divisiveness within their own ranks.

Kinta is not the top dawg in his gang, and he is certainly not the brightest, but he is the most sincere. He throws himself into whatever the gang wants him to do with surpassing zeal. Other gang members take note of this, and see a way to exploit him. Kinta goes along with a scheme to take the rap for a murder charge for someone higher up in the criminal hierarchy on the promise that once he's done his stretch on the inside he will have greater status as a yakuza. Kinta is clearly a fool, and yet I found his sincerity believable. Kinta has a conception in his mind of what the gang is that has little to do with the stark reality. Kinta is loyal to this conception, this fantasy, and that makes him a dreamer. It's hard not to like a dreamer, you know? I found myself wondering what the gang would've been able to accomplish if Kinta had been put in charge instead of the depressive hypochondriac Tetsu.

The central conflict within the movie exists between the lovers Kinta and Haruko. It is not so much a moral conflict, as in virtue versus vice, as it is a kind of existential conflict between agency and dependency. Both Kinta and Haruko are pragmatists to some degree. They both believe in doing whatever is necessary to survive and get ahead in life, but they have conflicting visions of how to achieve these ends. Kinta believes in his gang, and their enterprises: pig farming, racketeering, pimping. Haruko believes in herself, and in her ability to make her own  way in the world. Haruko wants to escape being dependent on the presence of the American military, and the oppressive family which would deny her the chance to strike out on her own. They're both pragmatists, but they're both dreamers as well.

Visually, Kinta and Haruko are often shown within Imamura's glorious black and white widescreen compositions as being enveloped by the various gritty, lived-in environments of Yokosuka, and also being crowded by the other characters, family, yakuza, and sailors. Kinta, especially, is often marginalized within the framing, appearing in the background while foreground characters discuss plans and schemes which Kinta has no choice but to follow along with or help execute as a loyal flunky.

Now and again, Kinta and Haruko have scenes together, and the two seem to dominate the scenery, sometimes towering over the camera, almost as though their passion for each other and their crazy dreams of future prosperity threaten to elevate them out of the gritty, quirky realism of Imamura's movie and into the realm of Hollywood melodrama. But even these scenes are off kilter, and often have resolutions which undercut the romance. Haruko drags Kinta away from his yakuza buddies to a hilltop and exhorts him to ditch the gang and make a new, legitimate life, but Kinta resists. Passionate words are exchanged, and the young lovers are framed against beautiful landscapes. But at the end, Kinta goes running down the hill, stumbles, and falls on his ass. Kinta picks himself up, though, keeps on running, and you gotta admire the kid's moxie.

Imamura's movie is highly eclectic, mixing in elements of yakuza gangster movies, farce, romance, realism, and satire, but he manages to make it all hang together with a dynamic sense of editing and pacing. In another director's hands this same material would've been grim and plodding, but Imamura transforms it into a kind of adventure but without toning down the grit and grime.There are quite a few rapid turns of plot and motivation as well, and it may require a couple of viewings to keep track of what all happens. The tone is frequently comical, and yet many serious, disturbing things transpire. It all builds to a crazed, slightly surreal climax wherein the pent-up rage and frustration of various characters finds release. Indeed, the ending seems to be somewhat influenced by what all these characters picked up watching American gangster movies, almost as though conflicting inner visions of what they were all aspiring to become in life were unleashed and began to trample each other . . .