The Cameraman's Revenge

DVDBeaver’s review describes this film as “seething”, and that strikes me as perfectly apt, for Harakiri does nothing if it does not seethe. There is rage bubbling away under the surface of the film; it’s a slow-burner that lets its anger come forth in fairly measured fashion, but it builds up to a terribly satisfying climactic outburst. The story is set in the early years of the shogunate, when many former warlords have been divested of their domains and thousands of new ronin suddenly find themselves struggling to survive without their former masters. Some have been pestering various noble houses, threatening to commit harakiri on their properties, hoping to be given work or at least be sent home with money. But the House of Iyi are less inclined to that sort of generosity. So when Tsugumo rocks up asking for a place to commit harakiri, he’s given the story of how the last ronin to do so was forced to carry out harakiri after all… but when he’s not deterred by this, suspicions start to grow. As the film unfolds, the reasons why Tsugumo’s come to the Iyi despite their reputed “martial valour” become clear and that anger spills out, anger at the general social situation created by the shogunate and at the specific viciousness of the Iyi, who are ultimately more concerned with appearing honourable rather than actually being honourable. At 133 minutes, it’s a slow burner like I said, but I thought it was rivetting; Tatsuya Nakadai is intense as Tsugumo (although I could never escape the fact that he was too young to be playing someone who must’ve been in his mid-40s), and Kobayashi is obviously on top of what he’s doing as far as building up tension and finaly releasing it goes. Terrific stuff, and amazing to think his next film after this would be the couldn’t-be-more-different Kwaidan (which I really must rewatch soon)…

After the spectacular non-success of Profound Desires of the Gods, Imamura retreated into documentary making for a number of years, before finally returning to fiction features with a film based on fact. It’s a true crime story, to be more precise, looking at the adventures of a man who killed five people in Japan in 1963 and eluded police for several weeks thereafter. Plotwise I suppose the film actually is that simple, and as far as I can tell from my limited knowledge I don’t think the film takes any great liberties with events other than changing the names of the actual people involved (which were changed anyway in the novel that Imamura based the film on); the complications come from the film’s chronological structure involving, technically, flashbacks within flashbacks (which, for the most part, didn’t phase me that much, though admittedly I had to rewind the disc a few times when I felt I’d missed something), and also the psychology at work. Cos Imamura never really gives reasons for Enokizu’s acts; there’s obvious daddy issues at work (with an additional helping of Oedipus), stemming from seeing his father humiliated by an imperial officer in 1938, when Enokizu was a child, but there’s also a feeling that this is too simple an explanation for what he does; Enokizu is a clear bundle of confused instincts (his religious background—part of Japan’s Roman Catholic minority—being just one) and it’s probably too easy to pin his deeds down to just one factor. As for weird relationships, well, I suppose Dad’s fascination with his son’s wife (and vice versa) doesn’t really count as incest per se, but it’s still dubious. I don’t think I liked this as much as the other Imamura films I’ve seen (the length doesn’t help), but it’s still good. I regret now that when I taped it off SBS years ago I never watched it at the time (I was terrible for taping stuff then not watching it), cos otherwise I’d have latched onto Imamura a lot sooner than I have…

If the, er, family dynamic in Profound Desires of the Gods was kind of fucked, it’s not much better in the film Shohei Imamura made before it. Haru is a middle-aged widow in a relationship with her long-term boarder Ogata, but she’s concerned that her late husband disapproves (she thinks he’s reincarnated as the carp in their fish tank). On top of that there’s something kind of Oedipal between her and her son Koichi, while Ogata’s real objet d’affection seems to be her 15-year-old daughter Keiko. Ogata is also a manufacturer of 8mm porn films, and one of his films involves a schoolgirl rape fantasy in which one of Keiko’s uniforms is “borrowed” as a costume (the film itself stars a young retarded girl whose partner in the film is her own father). I mean, JESUS FUCK. IMDB tells me the film was released in the US in August 1966, which stuns me; not that I think IMDB is wrong necessarily, but because I just can’t imagine something this perverse being released there in 1966, even shorn of several minutes and (presumably) only showing in limited arthouse release…  Needless to say, the state of affairs Imamura depicts here (which he does with an awful lot of subdivision of the Scope frame using window/door frames, bars on windows, etc; he evidently fell in love with cutting the rectangle of the screen into smaller spaces) cannot exactly end well, and once Ogata gets sprung by the cops for peddling smut things really go downhill (parenthetically, how odd is it that I should see two films in fairly close succession—The Horse’s Mouth being the other—that both end with the protagonist on an unloosed houseboat drifting hell knows where?). Arguably The Pornographers is a lot longer than it really needed to be, but I still liked it; glad I noticed SBS were running it tonight and that I remembered to tune in. Imamura is proving to be one of my top belated discoveries of this year…

This is fucked up. That was the gist of pretty much all the reviews I’ve seen of this film following its much-delayed release in the West, and they weren’t kidding; this is some spectacularly weird shit here. Reduced to the broad outline of its plot, House is reasonably straightforward to some extent; a group of Japanese schoolgirls go to visit the aunt of one at the girls during the school holidays at her isolated countryside house, but malign supernatural forces lurking around the place make themselves known. So far, so Amityville… but this really is one of those films where the handling of the material is more important than the material itself. The story actually came from the director’s young daughter, and is full of weird incidental detail, and director Obayashi matches it well with his own extravagant visual technique. Obayashi had a flourishing career in directing commercials (as the trailer on the DVD amusingly notes), and it was apparently criticised in some quarters for looking like a commercial (which I suppose it does), but no doubt that was the point, to provide this distinctive material with a distinctive look. As Obayashi says in the DVD interview, he never expected he’d actually get to make a “proper” film given the nature of the Japanese studio system, and really only got the chance in kind of random fashion… so the film often gave me a sense that he’d decided he would never get the chance again and so he’d better fill the film with every visual, editing and sound trick he’d learned in his advertising career in case this was indeed a one-shot. The end result is quite ostentatious in its weirdness, practically shouting at you to look at how fucking strange it is, and it actually works better than this sort of overt oddity tends to do; if you’re attuned to its approach, House has much to offer.

Takeshi Kitano’s self-titled effort was apparently the cause of much bewilderment upon its premiere at the 2005 Venice Film Festival, and I wonder if that was partly due to him being a right polymath at home in Japan—filmmaker, actor, TV talk show and game show host, stand-up comic, author of novels, poetry and film criticism—whereas in the west we only seem to know him as a director rather than an all-round celebrity. And, to be sure, as the first film he made after having a megahit with Zatoichi, it must’ve come as an eccentric decision at best. Taken by itself, I actually didn’t think it was anywhere near as complicated as others would make out, cos the story isn’t that hard to boil down… Kitano plays two versions of himself, the celebrity “Beat” Takeshi and the humble convenience store worker Kitano, the latter being the former’s identical double except for his hair colour; when the two of them meet at a TV station, Kitano’s life gradually descends into a sort of madness as his reality becomes more and more mixed with the fantasy of being Takeshi. That’s not hard to understand or follow. Which is not to say the film isn’t bizarre, because it is, frequently and fantastically so; actors play multiple roles and the structure of the film is built as a series of dreams within dreams (culminating by making us question just whose fantasy has this been all along) and a cunning use of flash-forwards. But if you’re paying attention, it’s not that difficult, surely. Obviously it wouldn’t be your first port of call if you were new to Kitano, and you probably need to be reasonably au fait with his work to get some of the jokes (I’m sure I missed several, though the riotously absurd violence—particularly the magnificent beach shootout—speaks for itself). I thought it was a lot of fun; now I want to see the two films he followed it with (and re-watch some of the older ones)…

Pausing our course through the Chabrol box briefly to take advantage of SBS2 showing Imamura-san’s first “real” film tonight… I could only get cover art for the whole Criterion collection of his films, not for this one by itself, but it looks like I shall be investing in the box anyway the next time I see it around, cos I liked this (and hopefully the DVD will be better than SBS’ old and problematic print too). Imamura had been assistant director to Yasujiro Ozu in the 50s, an experience which apparently made him determined to establish himself as the anti-Ozu when he graduated to directing himself. And, to be sure, though Ozu did make crime films in the silent era, I don’t think he would ever have made one where the crooks kill someone and feed the guy’s body to pigs. Our “hero” is a young man called Kinta, of rather doubtful intelligence but with plans to become a big man by working for a gang who operate around a port town full of American sailors and ships; this gang is so small-scale, however, they don’t even count as yakuza per se, with one of their main bits of business being a fairly humble piggery. We’ve seen this sort of thing before, the kid who becomes a gangster to avoid a real job, and the girlfriend who wishes he’d give it all up, and gangster solidarity not being all it’s cracked up to be, but the particular setting (this Yank-infested town where both the locals and the visitors are stuck in happily (?) mutual exploitation) gives it flavour, along with Imamura’s sense of black humour (when one of the gang tries to throw himself under a train but fails, we see him standing next to a billboard for life insurance). And I’ve never heard of any other film of this sort that ends with hundreds of pigs (i.e. actual pigs, not figurative ones) rampaging through the streets in pursuit of the crooks. Great.

Yet again with the legendary directors by whom I’ve never seen anything until now. Shohei Imamura in this particular case, who for some reason is someone I’ve often thought I should look into, and, well, for some reason I clearly felt the need to throw myself in at the deep end. 18 months in the making, then decades in the rediscovering, it is about as “fucking hell” in its way as the title may indicate. Set on an island called Kurage (meant to be a kind of fictional stand-in for Okinawa, where it was shot), the film focuses on the island’s oldest family, the Futoris, who have what may be politely called a problem with incest and are accordingly shunned by the other locals, who see their, er, activities as partly to blame for the island’s many other problems. The island’s transition from rice paddy farming to growing sugar cane isn’t helping either, and Kurage faces a transition to modernity that’s going to hurt. Indeed, it’s kind of stunning at times to be reminded that this story is, in fact, taking place in the modern age, some time in the early 1960s (cf. the scene when a plane flies overhead and a reference is made to it being on its way to Vietnam); the island hasn’t caught up with the rest of the world so much that a certain mythical quality doesn’t overlay much of the action, and Imamura obviously wants to draw parallels between the behaviour of Nekichi and his sister/lover Uma and that of the sibling god and goddess who founded the island in its creation myth; the latter may have an outboard motor on the boat they ultimately try to flee in, but it still feels like it’s happening in some legendary prehistory. Invariably beautiful to look at (they couldn’t go far wrong with that location) over its nearly three -hour duration, if occasionally difficult to penetrate, Profound Desires of the Gods is singular and fascinating stuff; now that it’s back in circulation I expect its international critical stock will rise big time…

Street of Shame is also in this box set but I don’t think I need to redo the review of that, so we’ll be ending this tour of late Mizoguchi with his first colour film… I was interested to learn that this project was actually initiated by Shaw and Sons in Hong Kong, the company Run De Shaw operated before younger brother Run Run set up Shaw Brothers, and the company which was pretty much wiped out by this film (thus leaving room for Run Run to muscle into). I gather Mizoguchi’s films first impressed Western audiences as exotica, to some degree, but this film added a further layer by being set in 8th century China, so it was kind of exotic for him too; at least this time he was happier about working on this film, although it seems to have mainly been because he finally had the chance to work in colour rather than because he found the story terribly interesting… And, looking at the Wikipedia entries for the historical characters involved, the Emperor and his famous concubine, I think their stories are incredibly interesting and I don’t know why so many of the details were changed for the film; the screen emperor seems like a man out of his depth and at the mercy of his court while the real one presided over a sort of golden age, and the real Yang was an actual princess rather than a rescued kitchenhand. Why were things like that changed in the film? Cos it’s not like the changes actually improve the story dramatically. The whole thing struck me as kind of feeble, and Run De Shaw was apparently so appalled by it he never released it in the Chinese territories he controlled and Shaw and Sons went under as a result.

1954 was  a busy year for Kenji Mizoguchi, this being his third release for that year… first time he’d been that prolific since 1935, if IMDB is right. Tony Rayns’ introduction left me a bit apprehensive again, as this seems to have been another case of Mizoguchi not wanting to do the film; Rayns hypothesises that his drive to outdo Kurosawa was finally fading and also he was in poor spirits over the bitter end of his curious romance with Kinuyo Tanaka, plus he was apparently continually clashing with his star Kazuo Hasegawa (who was not quite as “too old” here as he would be in An Actor’s Revenge in 1963, but was still not as young as his character was probably supposed to be). I wonder if he was just burned out by this time, though, cos to be honest I got that sort of feeling from the film… This was a really unsatisfying film for some reason, made even stranger by the fact that Mizoguchi’s source—a puppet play by Chikamatsu based on an actual case from the 1600s of adultery and “double suicide”—was, if the DVD booklet is to be believed, a kind of comic tale. Mohei is the head clerk for the Great Printer of Kyoto, whose wife Osan needs money to help her brother but the Printer is a tight-fisted old prick, so Mohei offers to help by, well, defrauding the old bastard. When he gets sprung, he and Osan run for it, which makes everyone think they’ve also been lovers all along… and this was an age when adultery was punishable by crucifixion, so they’re in even bigger trouble. Possibly it’s a barrel of laughs on stage (the play even has a “happy” ending), but hardly so on screen (Mizoguchi ditches the happy ending and even has the printer punished for not reporting the adulterers on top of that). Either way, it just didn’t click for me at all.

Tony Rayns’ introductions on these Masters of Cinema Mizoguchi editions have been useful and enlightening, especially the one he did for this film. Going on past experience, you’d expect by now that a story set more or less in a brothel and obviously having the oldest profession as its background would have been prime Mizoguchi territory, or at least I would’ve done. I’d have been wrong, though; according to Rayns, this film was kind of forced on him by the studio; evidently Daiei thought this was the sort of thing he did even though he apparently had no interest in this particular story. That made me worry when I heard that, cos I got the impression I wasn’t in for much of a ride with this film… so I was actually a bit surprised that I did like it; if Mizoguchi was kind of disconnected from this film for some reason, I didn’t really feel it… Prostitution is kind of the background to the film’s story, though, which is more about a mother and a daughter, the former of whom runs the brothel and the latter of whom, frankly, hates it. But Mum’s got her eye on legitimising herself by helping a young doctor she fancies to set up his own clinic and become Mrs Doctor; complications ensue (don’t they always) when the doctor falls for the daughter instead. There is a reasonable amount of room for melodrama in all this, and it would be wrong to deny that Mizoguchi fills that space (using such devices as the happy [?] couple[s] attending a Noh play about the foolishness of an old woman falling in love with a younger man), but it moves at a fair pace through its 84 minutes. Though obviously hardly a major production in the way that Ugetsu or Sansho were, I still wound up liking this rather more than I expected to.