If you saw Abbas Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry you may recall a joke told by the Turkish taxidermist: When a man complains to a doctor that every part of his body hurts—”When I touch my chest, that hurts; when I touch my arm and my leg, my arm and my leg hurt”—the doctor suggests that what’s actually bothering him is an infected finger. Similarly, when we think about Japan we may be prone to confuse what we’re pointing at with the finger that’s doing the pointing—especially given how much of a role our country played in the rebuilding of Japan after the war. (Perhaps significantly, scant attention is paid to Japanese movies about—and made during—the American occupation, such as Yasujiro Ozu’s devastating and uncharacteristic A Hen in the Wind and Kenji Mizoguchi’s Utamaro and His Five Women, a period film whose theme of artistic imprisonment is clearly addressed to his contemporaries.)
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One can’t assign the same motivation to the work of Shohei Imamura, but signs of American influences are as notable in Dr. Akagi (pronounced Ah-ka-gee, with a hard G) as they are in The Eel, his previous film. Both films evoke the small, closely knit, and highly interactive communities of John Ford movies such as Judge Priest, Wagonmaster, The Sun Shines Bright, The Quiet Man, and Donovan’s Reef; furthermore, the Nation’s Stuart Klawans has recently proposed some suggestive links between Dr. Akagi and Marx Brothers movies such as Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera. Dr. Akagi is set during the last days of the war, and the first bits of dialogue we hear come from American bomber pilots flying over Okayama, an island village with a POW camp and factory where most of the action is set. Moreover, the film features a perky and largely anachronistic jazz score by Yosuke Yamashita that reeks of American big-band charts of the 50s and 60s, with occasional stretches of free jazz that seem to come from a slightly later period.
Imamura, who turns 73 this year, has announced that Dr. Akagi will be his last film. It’s far too eclectic to qualify as “characteristic”—perhaps an unsuitable adjective for any of his free-ranging works—yet it’s every bit as personal as another twilight “testament” movie playing this week, Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. Imamura, whose own father was a doctor dedicated throughout his life to his profession, got the idea for the film from a short novel by Ango Sakaguchi (whose title, Kanzo Sensei, translates as “Dr. Liver”), yet Imamura and his son, who collaborated on the script under the pseudonym Daisuke Tengan, reportedly retained only the title character and invented everything else. Imamura was a teenager at the end of the war, and one comes away from this film feeling that a settling of accounts was a major motivation for it. As a project Dr. Akagi predates The Eel, having been conceived around the same time as the 1989 Black Rain, but it took Imamura the better part of a decade, during which The Eel shared the grand prize at Cannes with Taste of Cherry, to raise enough money to make it.
Akagi’s monomaniacal conviction and frantic research—he makes a trip to Tokyo just to search for a better lens for his microscope and digs up the fresh corpse of a local movie exhibitor and former patient to extract the liver—eventually bring him into conflict with the POW camp commander after he and Sonoko shelter and care for Piet (Jacques Gamblin), a wounded Dutch prisoner who escapes from the camp after being tortured for suspected espionage. Piet, who’d worked with cameras before joining the army, helps out with the microscope, and as a result the war against hepatitis and the larger war effort are brought into direct conflict. (To compound the anomaly, Akagi and Piet converse exclusively in German.)
Akagi: “Yes, beautiful. It’s a species of bacteria. That microcosm is full of life. In the eyes of God, perhaps we are that small.”
Sonoko: “Better off being bacteria. More fun.”
Directed by Shohei Imamura
Written by Imamura and Daisuke Tengan
With Akira Emoto, Kumiko Aso, Jyuro Kara, Jacques Gamblin, and Masanori Sera.
