The Eel
With Koji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu, Fujio Tsuneta, Mitsuko Baisho, Akira Emoto, and Sho Aikawa.
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It’s been a truism for quite some time that the Japanese cinema is in terrible shape, financially and aesthetically (particularly now that Akira Kurosawa has died)–though it’s not clear to what extent one should believe the overseas commentators who sift through the available evidence. I’ve come to mistrust American critics who dismiss the output of a national cinema on the basis of the two or three examples they see per year, especially when I see other examples at European film festivals that undermine their conclusions. But 15 years ago Dave Kehr wrote the best English-language account of Imamura that I know, and he began by noting, “The Japanese cinema still exists…though just barely. The impact of television has reduced an annual audience set at 1 billion in 1960 to 150 million in 1980; of the 350 now [1983] made each year, the Japanese critic Tadao Sato estimates that 200 are pornographic. Many of the New Wave directors of the 50s and 60s have given up in frustration.” And Imamura, who’s been making films for the past 40 years, apparently has a lot of trouble getting his projects bankrolled.
“Imamura takes his characters seriously but makes fun of their behavior,” Yann Tobin wrote in Positif last year, which strikes me as an excellent one-line summary of the way Ford works as well. A good early example of this comic approach comes when we first see The Eel’s hero, just released after eight years in prison, marching and panting like a soldier as he and a Buddhist priest go for a casual walk, then running mechanically after a jogging team that passes them–the conditioned reflex of a man who’s spent too much time sprinting across prison yards.
The problem with recounting even part of the plot is that it reveals practically nothing of the film’s overall feel and quirky texture. If the movie’s main subject is Takuro’s gradual regeneration as a romantic and social being, its style is attentive mainly to internal and external factors that lie far beyond this synopsis. The internal factors are subjective flashbacks and dream sequences that periodically tell us things about Takuro’s consciousness. Sometimes they’re as brief as single shots or remembered (or imagined) lines of dialogue, and sometimes they’re longer or more elaborate; but all of them are accorded the same status as the objective facts of Takuro’s life–or at least Imamura treats them more as objective events than as bracketed interludes.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): film still.
