Fighting Elegy (Seijun Suzuki, 1966)

Hideki Takahashi and Junko Asana in Fighting Elegy

Kiroku Nanbu: Hideki Takahashi
Michiko: Junko Asana
Turtle: Yusuke Kawazu
Takuan: Mitsuo Kataoka
Principal: Isao Tamagawa
Kaneda: Keisuke Noro
Ikki Kita: Hiroshi Midorigawa
Kiroku's Father: Seijiro Onda
Yoshino Nanbu: Chikaku Miyagi

Director: Seijun Suzuki
Screenplay: Kaneto Shindo
Based on a novel by Takashi Suzuki
Cinematography: Kenji Hagiwara
Production design: Takeo Kimura
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Naozumi Yamamoto

Seijun Suzuki's Fighting Elegy is a coming-of-age story, ostensibly about a hormone-crazed teenager who tries to sublimate his lust for the pretty Michiko and to expiate his Catholic guilt for that lust by joining one of the warring gangs in his town. But what's really coming of age, as we find out at the film's end, is the militaristic imperialism of prewar Japan. So much of the film depends on Suzuki's mastery of tone as he shifts from the mostly comic story of young Kiroku's plight to the wholly tragic outcome. Kiroku becomes increasingly adept as a fighter, and his rebellious antics at school are not punished so much as increasingly tolerated -- even his father refuses to punish him, taking a boys-will-be-boys attitude. When he's forced to go live with his uncle and transfer to another school, he only gets more bellicose, but although the school has a motto that stresses the necessity of "seemly" behavior, at the end of his stay there the principal is so impressed by Kiroku's fighting skills that he removes his coat and challenges Kiroku to a duel. The scene ends with the two squaring off, suggesting that part of the reason for the military's takeover lies in the older Japanese generation's admiration for the violence of the young. The film ends with Michiko going into a convent, but not before she is forced off of the path she is traveling by a troop of jogging soldiers and her crucifix is trodden into the snow, and with Kiroku on the train to Tokyo, where he plans to join the fight for control of the government. It's not clear from the film which side Kiroku will fight on this time, although the novel on which it's based has him joining the army and dying in China. Suzuki scripted this part of the novel and planned to film it as a sequel before he was forced out of his job at the Nikkatsu studios. Fighting Elegy is an exhibition of Suzuki's original and innovative technique, which audiences loved but studio management thought was out of control.

Endless Desire (Shohei Imamura, 1958)

Hiroyuki Nagato and Misako Watanabe in Endless Desire

Satoru: Hiroyuki Nagato
Shima Hashimoto: Misako Watanabe
Onuma: Taiji Tonoyama
Ryochi: Shoichi Ozawa
Ryuko: Hitome Nozoe
Yakuza: Takeshi Kato

Director: Shohei Imamura
Screenplay: Shohei Imamura, Hisashi Yamanouchi
Based on a novel by Shinji Fujiwara
Cinematography: Shinsaku Himeda
Production design: Kazu Otsuka
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

Commenting on lesser-known films, even though they've been made available on Filmstruck by the Criterion Collection, can be a problem. The IMDb listing for Endless Desire is curiously incomplete, lacking some cast names and identification of which roles some actors are playing, and there's little commentary available online to help refresh my memory of some plot details and to provide background information on the film. Which is a pity, because Endless Desire is an involving black comedy, that a few commentators have likened to Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers (1955) and Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (1992). It's less genially whimsical than the former and less explicitly bloody than the latter, but it holds its own in their company. The setup is this: Ten years after the surrender of Japan, a small group of former soldiers gather as planned to try to relocate a barrel full of morphine that was buried when the war ended. They expect to meet their former lieutenant, but discover that he's dead and that a woman, Shima Hashimoto, who says she is his sister, plans to help them recover the stash. In the meantime, however, a shopping district has grown up over the site, so the group leases an empty shop planning to tunnel over to the presumed location. And so it goes, as the greedy tunnelers squabble toward their goal, with Shima directing their moves and fending off such amorous advances as she may not wish to entertain. Somehow caught up in all of this is young Satoru, whom the landlord insists the treasure-hunters must hire in their phony real-estate office, and the pretty Ryuko, whom Satoru loves but who keeps him at an arm's length. The whole thing builds to a cataclysm, of course, in which the plans are complicated by the municipal authorities' decision to raze the shopping district over the tunnelers' heads, and the general greed leads to their killing one another off. This is early Imamura, and a film that he was pressed by the studio into doing, but it has much of his characteristic sardonic humor and jaundiced view of human beings.

The Pornographers (Shohei Imamura, 1966)

Sumiko Sakamoto and Shoichi Ozawa in The Pornographers

Subuyan Ogata: Shoichi Ozawa
Haru Matsuda: Sumiko Sakamoto
Keiko Matsuda: Keiko Sagawa
Banteki: Haruo Tanaka
Elderly Client: Ganjiro Nakamura
Koichi Matsuda: Masaomi Kondo
Shinun Ogata: Ichiro Sugai
Doctor: Kazuo Kitamura

Director: Shohei Imamura
Screenplay: Shohei Imamura, Koji Numata
Based on a novel by Akiyuki Nosaka
Cinematography: Shinsaku Himeda
Art direction: Hiromi Shiozawa, Ichiro Takada
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Toshiro Kusunoki, Toshiro Mayuzumi

Fascinating. confusing, sometimes funny, and sometimes just a little repellent. Must be a Shohei Imamura film. I don't shock easily, but Imamura always keeps me on the edge of being shocked, mostly because I don't know how far he'll go next. In The Pornographers, we're dealing not only with the title subject but also with incest and prostitution and even abuse of the mentally challenged, while desperately trying to sort out the very confused life of Subuyan Ogata. He is one of the pornographers of the title, and he lives with a widow, Haru, who thinks her dead husband has been reincarnated as the carp she keeps in a very confining fish tank. She has two nearly grown children: Toichi, who seems uncommonly attached to his mother, and Keiko, a rebel without a cause. Ogata is obsessed with Keiko, whom he has known since she was a little girl. Nothing good is going to come out of his relationship with the Matsuda family, of course, especially after Haru gets pregnant and goes insane. But figuring out the ins and outs of the film's plot, and even whether what we're watching is flashback or dream or fantasy is part of the essence of its fascination -- and its repellent quality. Imamura isn't quite like any filmmaker I know of.

Pigs and Battleships (Shohei Imamura, 1961)

Jitsuko Yoshimura in Pigs and Battleships

Kinta: Hiroyuki Nagato
Haruko: Jitsuko Yoshimura
Himori: Masao Mishima
Slasher Tetsuji: Tetsuro Tanba
Hoshino: Shiro Osaka
Ohachi: Takeshi Kato
Gunji, Gangster in Check Shirt: Shoichi Ozawa
Katsuyo: Yoko Minimida
Kikuo: Hideo Sato
Kan'ichi: Eijiro Tono
Sakiyama: Akira Yamauchi
Hiromi: Sanae Nakahara
Haruko's Mother: Kin Sugai
Harukoma: Bumon Kahara

Director: Shohei Imamura
Screenplay: Hisashi Yamanouchi, Gisashi Yamauchi
Based on a novel by Kazu Otsuka
Cinematography: Shinsaku Himeda
Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

It seems to be common in critiques of Shohei Imamura's work to contrast him with his mentor, Yasujiro Ozu. The world of Ozu's films is that of the settled middle class families, with their marriageable daughters and salarymen breadwinners, filmed in the stately, low camera angle style that almost immediately identifies Ozu's work. Imamura's films are full of low-lifes, people struggling to get along by any means necessary, and are full of flamboyant camerawork, such as the spectacularly crowded widescreen compositions in Pigs and Battleships. A contrast of Ozu and Imamura is rather like a contrast of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens: Both do things with radically different means, the one with a raucous, satiric assortment of colorful characters, the other with a quiet, ironic examination of manners and mores. But both Ozu and Imamura share something: an admiration for strong women. In the case of Pigs and Battleships, it's Haruko, struggling to find herself in the hurlyburly of Yokosuka, the port city infested with American sailors. She has had the misfortune to fall in love with the goofball Kinta, who wants to make his name as a yakuza, getting involved with the gang's pig-raising scheme. Hiroyuki Nagato gives a hilariously loosey-goosey performance as Kinta, mugging like Jerry Lewis when he really wants to be Humphrey Bogart. It's not entirely clear what Jitsuko Yoshimura's Haruko really sees in Kinta, but the performance of the two actors together is highly entertaining. Although the film plays mostly for comedy, culminating in the destruction of much of the red-light district by a stampede of pigs, it features several murders and the rape of Haruko by three American sailors, with the result that it's dominated by a kind of Swiftian satiric tone.

The Insect Woman (Shohei Imamura, 1963)

Sachiko Hidari in The Insect Woman

Tome Matsuki: Sachiko Hidari
Nobuko: Jitsuko Yoshimura
Karasawa: Seizaburo Kawazu
Chuji: Kazuo Kitamura
En: Sumie Sasaki
Midori: Masumi Harukawa
Madam: Tanie Kitabayashi

Director: Shohei Imamura
Screenplay: Keiji Hasebe, Shohei Imamura
Cinematography: Shinsaku Himeda
Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi

The Insect Woman sounds like a horror movie, and in a sense it is: It's the horror of 20th century Japanese history as seen through the eyes of a woman, Tome Matsuki. She is explicitly, and perhaps a little heavy-handedly, likened to an insect by the way Shohei Imamura opens and closes his film. It starts with a close-up of a beetle, scurrying across the ground and then trying to climb a crumbling mound of dirt. It ends with Tome struggling to climb a hill, carrying a satchel on her back and wearing flimsy wooden geta, which eventually fall apart and leave her walking through the mud in her socks. She is, like the beetle, a portrait of blind determination. And that determination, a survival instinct as strong as the beetle's, is what gets her through everything that befalls her in the film. Born in a squalid farming village to a woman known for her promiscuity, she is raised mainly by Chuji, her somewhat mentally challenged stepfather -- who also becomes her lover. She calls him "Papa," as she will later call her lover "Father." When war comes, she goes to work in a factory but is called home by the villagers, claiming that her father is dying, a lie to bring her back so she can become the mistress of their landlord. He abandons her and leaves her pregnant, and when the child is born her mother insists that since it's a girl it should be killed. But Tome keeps her and names her Nobuko. Eventually, Nobuko will also share Chuji's bed as well as that of Tome's lover, Karasawa, both with Tome's approval. Tome meets Karasawa in Tokyo, where she becomes a union organizer, a maid, a prostitute, and eventually the manager of her own staff of call girls. All of this is told in the most matter-of-fact way possible: Imamura never sanitizes or glamorizes or sentimentalizes Tome's behavior. It is what it is, he suggests: a way of getting through life. Even a setback like going to jail doesn't deter Tome. The film is held together by Sachiko Hidari's astonishing performance, in which she ages from teenager to a woman in her waning middle ages without obvious makeup tricks. Imamura's insistence on location shooting gives the film a documentary quality as well as a sense of life closing in on his characters: There is, for example, a horrifying scene that takes place in the home of Midori, one of Tome's friends, in which Tome, in the foreground, is distracted by the sound of Midori and a man making love, while in the background Midori's small daughter by an American serviceman climbs up on a chair by the stove on which the stew Tome is making is simmering. Although the focus is on Tome, we can clearly see the child as she imitates Tome's cooking and then knocks the pot from the stove. Although the little girl is scalded to death, everyone including Midori takes it in stride. Imamura's title in Japanese translates to Entomological Chronicle of Japan, which expresses perfectly the director's detached treatment of his characters: bugs viewed through a magnifying glass.