THE EEL (1997)
"You talk to the eel because you don't like dealing with people, right?"
3.5 out of ****
Starring Koji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu, Fujio Tokita, Mitsuko Baisho, Akira Emoto; Directed by Shohei Imamura; Written by Imamura, Daisuke Tengan, and Motofumi Tomikawa, from a novel by Akira Yoshimura; Cinematography by Shigeru Komatsubara
A roll call of Shohei Imamura's protagonists reads like a summary of society's cast-offs. A prostitute. A pornographer. A serial killer. A pimp. A radiation poisoning victim. And, in THE EEL, a man who murders his wife and, eight years later, tries to start a new life. Imamura always empathizes with the people in his movies, although they are not always sympathetic: while some are victims, others deserve no pity. Certainly, it is difficult to feel sympathy for Yamashita, the wife-killer, when the pre-credits sequence shows us the murder, which is sudden, brutal, unforgivable, graphic, and not easy to sit through.
This is what happens: Yamashita (Koji Yakusho of SHALL WE DANCE? and TAMPOPO) suspects that his wife is cheating on him. He comes home early one night from fishing, to find a strange car in his driveway and the sound of heated lovemaking coming from his bedroom. He looks in. We see a close-up of his face as he watches, impassive, for a moment, and then his face dissolves into shadow, as he goes to the side of the house, fetches a sharp trowel, and then enters the bedroom. He wounds the man in flagrante delicto, then methodically stabs his wife to death. The camera does not turn away; blood spatters the lens. Yamashita then cycles to the nearest police station and, in a splendidly deadpan moment, matter-of-factly confesses to the murder and hands over the murder weapon to the astonished desk sergeant. He does not dissemble. He cannot: there are no excuses.
We have gone from the everyday to the extreme to the absurd. Time for the opening credits. Most directors would be unable to muster such a sequence as a finale; for Imamura, it is merely the preamble to a movie that is never dull and often superb. Yamashita's action cannot, of course, be justified, and he knows that. But, his sentence over, he has a lot of life remaining to him. And this is where the movie really begins.
THE EEL is about how a man rebuilds his life after committing a crime he cannot rationalize or even explain. There is a scene in which he does try to explain--he killed his wife because he loved her too much to forgive her, or something--but it is not much of an explanation. He is not a man capable of murder, but he murdered someone. Go figure. As with the serial killer in Imamura's earlier VENGEANCE IS MINE, his motives are not to be understood. But there the similarity ends: the serial killer was amoral and subtly insane, while Yamashita is soft-spoken, polite, solicitous.
He relocates to a small town, under the eye of his parole officer, who is also a priest, and, having learned the trade of a barber during his prison term, Yamashita opens a barbershop, and soon establishes a small but loyal clientele--none of whom know about his past. The locals see him as rather eccentric, because he talks to his pet eel, and seems to care more for it than anyone else. In fact, Yamashita is rather dull, as killers go. The same cannot be said for the townsfolk around him, who include a young man who spends all his time trying to contact UFOs and a man obsessed with eel fishing. There is also a vivacious young woman, Keiko (Misa Shimizu), who comes to work in Yamashita's shop--against his wishes--after he finds her comatose in a field, an empty bubble-pack of pills by her outflung hand, and has her rushed to hospital, saving her life.
The would-be suicide has, like Yamashita, a troubled past, a past which is revealed, piecemeal, in flashbacks. Their cool professional relationship inevitably warms, to become a guarded rapport, and then heats up, becoming something more, although Yamashita holds something back: he remains emotionally detached from the world, partly as self-imposed punishment for what he did, partly from fear that he might do it again. Having structured the film with the murder first, Imamura makes it difficult to care for this man, but we do come to empathize with him: everything about him elicits our understanding, except for that inexplicable crime.
He can no more forget it than we can. The eel fisher takes him out to teach him how to spear eels, but when he tries to stab one, he cannot: thrusting the spear recalls the movement of his hand when he stabbed his wife. Images of an eel writhing on the end of a spear flash on the screen, pulsing with guilt and sexual symbolism. The symbolic associations of the eel, developed mostly in night-time conversations with the eel fisher, are actually one of the film's shortcomings, as Imamura overworks the metaphor, tending to explain in the dialogue what is already obvious from the context.
The working out of the love relationship is also rather flawed, sometimes predictable, sometimes sentimental, although the little things are constantly refreshing, like the character of Keiko's mother, an overbearing and mentally unbalanced flamenco dancer. But sentimentality, from this most unsentimental of directors, is perhaps not unwelcome. Imamura tends to see human relationships as primarily pragmatic, as matters of convenience. He regards the finer emotions with skepticism--perhaps too much skepticism. In THE EEL (and his previous film, BLACK RAIN) there is a touch of tenderness, new to his oeuvre, which makes his work seem broader, more complex, and therefore more complete.
Whatever the reason, Imamura's vision finds perhaps its quintessential expression in the climactic sequence of THE EEL, when all the major players in the film are brought together in the barbershop, as Keiko's past catches up with her. A melee erupts. It is a madcap orchestration of slapstick and sudden violence, funny and grotesque, and in the midst of the chaos are a few people trying to do the right thing. Imamura brings sense to the anarchy, and out of human failing creates hope. It is the work of a master at the height of his craft, and it bustles with life. It contains, perhaps, a summary of all Imamura has to tell us, and he has much to tell.
A Review by David Dalgleish (April 3rd, 1999)
daviddalgleish@yahoo.com
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