VENGEANCE IS MINE (1979)
"How long must we suffer because of you?"
3.5 out of ****
Starring Ken Ogata, Rentaro Mikuni, Mitsuko Baisho, Mayumi Ogawa
Directed by Shohei Imamura
Written by Masaru Baba, from a novel by Ryuzo Saki
Cinematography by Sinsaku Himeda
A man gets into a truck with two co-workers. He has done this many times before. They joke casually and drive down the road a way. The man and one of the co-workers get out, and go up a hill, out of sight of the truck. The man then viciously kills his co-worker. He returns to the truck, and later kills the other man, stabbing him repeatedly, remorselessly, in an act of unmitigated violence. There is no obvious reason for him to do this.
There are many ways to respond when we hear about something like this. Horror. Incomprehension. Sympathy for the victims' families. And curiosity. Not the morbid curiosity which keeps tabloid talk-shows on TV, but the curiosity that makes us wonder why anyone would do something like this, hoping that if we understood, we might be able to come to terms with it. Understanding might offer some measure of peace.
Shohei Imamura's VENGEANCE IS MINE is a lengthy, disturbing exercise in understanding. As one would expect from the iconoclastic Japanese director, the serial killer (Ken Ogata, in a magnificent performance) is not treated in the expected manner. This is not a suspense-filled yarn, pitting a brilliant detective against a wily villain in a deadly game of cat-and-mouse. Imamura begins his film with the killer, Enokizu, already in police custody, aware that he will soon be executed for his crimes. We are told how many people he killed, during the 78 days between the first murders and his arrest. There is no suspense.
Instead, this is a character study told in flashbacks. We meet Enokizu's father (Rentaro Mikuni), a devout Catholic who the young Enokizu considers a coward, after a key early childhood scene. We meet his wife (Mitsuko Baisho), a young woman he impregnates and marries out of a sense of duty, not love. He becomes a criminal, a con artist, and is imprisoned for fraud; his wife divorces him, but the father persuades her to remarry him. He is released, and beats his wife for her infidelity.
The killings proceed logically from these past events, although we cannot point to a specific moment and say, 'That's what did it--that's what made him a murderer.' Later, we will meet his final victims, a brothel madam and her mother. The madam (Mayumi Ogawa) falls in love with the killer, posing as a university professor, and remains devoted even after she learns what he has done. He kills her too. There is a sad inevitability to it all.
But because this is an Imamura film, it is not sad and reflective about what happens. Shocking brutality and black humour are par for the course. While there are only two notably violent scenes in VENGEANCE IS MINE (the first two murders), they are among the most disturbing I have ever seen. The way Imamura accomplishes this is interesting. He does not embellish the killings with stylistic flourishes, nor does he play campy music on the soundtrack à la Lynch or Tarantino. He simply presents these brutal acts plainly, objectively, without excess. The movie does not tell us what to feel; it simply shows what happens, putting as little distance as possible between audience and screen, leaving us to consider these heinous crimes in cold, merciless detail. It is disquieting, and it is also superb directing.
Imamura views Japanese society with the same clinical detachment. His entire career is an ongoing critique of his society, and here we see a Japan which passively allows a killer to walk in its midst, and even accepts him, on some level. Enokizu's face is on billboard notices, on TV, even in movie theatres, after the first two murders, yet he walks the streets of Tokyo and no one turns him in. Some people notice his resemblance to the serial killer whose picture is being broadcast, but they figure that it either can't be him, or if it is him, it's not worth getting involved. And so three more people die because of an apathy, a complacency, a malaise which Imamura sees as deep-rooted in Japanese society.
But the focus of the film is the killer, not his society, and by the time the end credits roll, we know Enokizu intimately. He does not rant and rave very often; he is not visibly different from anyone else; he is intelligent and capable of charm. But we are not surprised that he killed people--we are only surprised that it took him so long.
Do we understand his actions any better, finally? Enokizu has the definitive answer to that: when a detective says that he still doesn't understand the motive for the last two murders, the killer replies, "You never will." We are in the same position. We'll never understand. And so Imamura--whose films don't give you a warm, fuzzy feeling at the best of times--here presents the one thing worse than a world where a man kills people for no apparent reason: a world in which there really is no reason for his actions. It's an uncomfortable message, but turn on the evening news tonight, or open the newspaper tomorrow morning, and you may find it hard to disagree.
A Review by David Dalgleish (March 22/1998)
dgd@intouch.bc.ca
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