Empire of Passion (Nagisa Oshima, 1978)

Kazuo Yoshiyuki and Tatsuya Fuji in Empire of Passion

Cast: Tatsuya Fuji, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Takahiro Tamura, Takuzo Kawatani, Akiko Koyama, Taiji Tonoyama, Sumie Sasaki, Eizo Kitamura, Masami Hasegawa, Kenzo Kawarasaki. Screenplay: Nagisa Oshima, based on a story by Itoko Nakamura. Cinematography: Yoshio Miyajima. Set decoration: Jusho Toda. Film editing: Keiichi Uraoka. Music: Toru Takemitsu.

A fine, creepy ghost story set in Edo period Japan. A man and woman plot to murder her husband and throw his body in a well. But as their passion cools, they become the subject of gossip and rumor, driving them apart. And then the murdered man's ghost begins appearing and the police decide to investigate. Handled with Oshima's characteristic take on sexual obsession.

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.

An Innocent Witch (Heinosuke Gosho, 1965)

Jitsuko Yoshimura in An Innocent Witch

Ayako Oshima: Jitsuko Yoshimura
Kikuno: Kin Sugai
Kansuke Yamamura: Taiji Tonoyama
Kanjiro Toda: Minoru Terada
Kanichi Yamamura: Keizo Kawasaki
Father: Yoshio Yoshida
Shaman: Eijiro Tono
Narrator: Takayuki Akutagawa

Director: Heinosuke Gosho
Screenplay: Hideo Horie
Based on a novel by Hajime Ogawa
Cinematography: Sozaburo Shinomura
Art direction: Totetsu Hirakawa
Film editing: Sadako Ikeda
Music: Sei Ikeno

An Innocent Witch begins like a documentary, with a voiceover narration describing the pilgrimages to Mount Osore, where the faithful gather to ask blind seers to facilitate communication with their dead loved ones. One of the pilgrims is Kikuno, who wants to speak with her daughter, Ayako. As the seer goes into her trance, the film switches abruptly to a conventional narrative in which we learn that Ayako was sold -- willingly, it seems -- into prostitution by her mother because Ayako's father is too ill to continue supporting the family as a fisherman and gatherer of seaweed. (The father is never told about Ayako's work as a prostitute; he thinks only that she has gone to the city to earn more money.) In the brothel, Ayako loses her virginity to her first customer, a wealthy lumber wholesaler named Kansuke. Pleased with the young woman, Kansuke becomes Ayako's regular customer. Then one evening a shy young man named Kanjiro arrives with his fellow military cadets and Ayako relieves him of his virginity. They begin to fall in love, but just before he is called up for service, Kanjiro realizes that his own father, Kansuke, has been one of Ayako's customers. Kansuke, it turns out, has been aware that Kanjiro has also been seeing Ayako, and doesn't really mind sharing her with his son. But Ayako has promised Kanjiro that she won't see his father again, and when Kansuke insists on having sex with her anyway, he dies of an apparent heart attack. Soon word arrives that Kanjiro has also died at the front. The coincidence of the deaths of a father and son causes Ayako to be labeled a "femme fatale." But while visiting Kanjiro's grave, Ayako meets his older brother, Kanichi, and her involvement with this ill-fated family deepens into further tragedy. The film climaxes with Ayako seeking a kind of exorcism that will purify her of guilt, but that, too, has fatal consequences. The core story of An Innocent Witch is very well handled by screenwriter Hideo Horie and director Heinosuke Gosho, but the framing of it in the context of a documentary about the search for communication with the afterlife feels awkward, as if Horie and Gosho were trying to impose a larger statement about the consequences of superstition on the material. Ayako's story speaks for itself without extra help.