Vengeance is Shohei Imamura: Black Rain

These days, fifty-five is a relatively young age to pass, especially for a former pop idol. For the family and fans of Yoshiko Tanaka, it would be a tragic case of symmetry.  Justly lauded for her role as a “hibakusha” Hiroshima survivor, Tanaka succumbed to cancer in 2011. Although not exactly the sort of wrong-side-of-the-tracks noir that made his early reputation, Shohei Imamura’s Black Rain (trailer here) will make a fitting capstone to the Asia Society’s Vengeance is Imamura retrospective when it screens tonight (for free).

Yasuko was not in Hiroshima proper when the bomb was dropped, so she should be unaffected by “the flash.” However, she was caught in the “black rain” during the immediate aftermath. Despite her beauty, that is enough for most parents to put the nix on inquiries from her marriage broker.

Frankly, her matchmaking woes are more painful for her uncle Shigematsu Shizuma and his wife Shigeko. They had taken their niece into their home for safe keeping during the waning days of the war, promising to arrange her betrothal. Her potential old maid status grieves them personally and represents a potentially loss of face with their family and ancestors. Yet, as Yasuko’s prospects dim, she becomes increasingly devoted to the ailing Shizumas.

Imamura served an early apprenticeship with Yasujiro Ozu, so it is not so surprising to see his mentor’s influence imprinted on Rain. Like many of Ozu’s signature films, which focus on fathers and daughters or uncles and nieces, Rain is defined by the relationship between Yasuko and old man Shizuma. The way their bond steadily deepens is absolutely beautiful and agonizing to behold.

As Yasuko, Tanaka is exquisitely beautiful, profoundly moving, and in retrospect, sadly eerie. Likewise, Kazuo Kitamura is a wonderfully complex figure of strength and pathos. Their screen rapport is real and affecting.

Rain is also impressive on a technical level, vividly recreating the chaos and destruction of Hiroshima. Nevertheless, it is a far cry from an Irwin Allen picture.  It is also world’s removed from Ridley Scott’s Black Rain, which was also partly set in Japan and released in the same year. However, it makes much of the criticism leveled at The Wind Rises look largely misplaced. While Miyazaki’s animated feature addresses the repressive tactics of the militarist government’s secret police, Black Rain presents the Japanese war experience entirely in terms of passive victimhood.  Yet, its overt anti-nuclear sentiments earn it a pass.  Regardless, Black Rain is a mature and engrossing work from a master filmmaker. Highly recommended, it concludes the Vengeance is Imamura series tonight (2/1) at the Asia Society.

Vengeance is Shohei Imamura: Vengeance is Mine

Those who had a run-in with con man Akira Nishiguchi were fortunate if they only lost a few hundred thousand Yen.  He also left behind a trail of bodies. It was precisely the sort of case that appealed to Shohei Imamura’s artistic sensibilities, inspiring his return to narrative filmmaking after a string of legit documentaries. Appropriately, Imamura’s Vengeance is Mine (trailer here) screens in New York during the similarly titled Vengeance is Shohei Imamura film series now underway at the Asia Society.

Henceforth known as Isao Enokizu, Imamura’s Nishiguchi proxy never had a good relationship with his devoutly Catholic father, Shizuo. He was somewhat closer to his mother, but her persistent health problems largely keep her out of the picture.  He was a punk as a kid and graduated to full blown criminality as an adult.  Nevertheless, his father convinces his wife Kazuko to remarry him during his first prison stretch, for religious reasons.  Frankly, she will not see very much of him, even after his release.

As the audience witnesses in graphic detail, Enokizu will murder two former truck driving colleagues on their collection day, launching a seventy-eight day crime spree that will thoroughly embarrass the Tokyo police.  Given the in media res opening, it is clear Enokizu’s luck will eventually run out.  The question is how long he can last and how much damage he can do in the meantime.

As it happens, he finds the perfect hiding spot: a discretely tucked away suburban no-tell motel, run by proprietor Haru Asano and her mother, who specialize in procuring prostitutes for their guests.  Posing as a visiting professor, Enokizu maintains a professional relationship with Asano during his initial stay, only becoming her lover later, when his secret is out.

Motivations are a strange thing in Vengeance.  There is no accounting for them, beyond the usual lust, wrath, and resentment. While on the surface, Vengeance functions as a manhunt procedural thriller, an atmosphere of moral decay hangs over the entire film. It opens with one of the messiest, clumsiest murder sequences perhaps ever and proceeds to show viewers several of Enokizu’s furtive assignations, where sex and violence are provocatively intertwined, so you should probably leave the kids home for this one.

In a career defining performance, Ken Ogata is convincingly seductive within Enokizu’s on-screen world, but he leaves viewers deeply creeped out. He is a pure sociopath, whose emotional range spans from cold blooded calculation to spitting rage.

Ogata’s Enokizu is a practically a force of nature, like a hurricane, but his father and assorted lovers are not merely generic victims.  Rentarō Mikuni expresses in vivid terms just how the elder Enokizu’s moral failings are exacerbated by the stress and disgrace generated by his son.  Likewise, Mitsuko Baisho is achingly pitiable but still remarkably sensuous as his long suffering wife Kazuko.  Mayumi Ogawa is also equally haunting as Asano, a woman condemned to a life of Dickensian struggle by the scandals of others.

Both in terms of its themes and scope, Vengeance is one of the great films of the 1970’s, sitting comfortably beside the likes of Coppola’s The Conversation and Polanski’s Chinatown.  It is definitely a muscular noir, but it has a bitingly existential chaser.  Highly recommended for all movie lovers, it screens free of charge this Friday (1/24) as part of the Vengeance is Shohei Imamura mini-retrospective at the Asia Society.

Vengeance is Shohei Imamura: A Man Vanishes

There are not a lot of fact-checkers working in the documentary film industry.  Yet, many people assume anything they saw in a movie billing itself as a doc must be true.  Although it had its initial Japanese release in 1967, Shohei Imamura’s docu-deconstruction A Man Vanishes (trailer here) delivers a timely challenge to such blind faith.  Yet, it is still gritty and noir enough to easily fit within the Asia Society’s mini-retrospective, Vengeance is Shohei Imamura when it screens (for free) this Saturday.

As a salaryman with a steady job and a fiancée, Tadashi Oshima initially seems like an aptly unremarkable representative of the reported 91,000 Japanese citizens who vanished without a trace two years prior.  However, as Imamura’s on-camera investigator and Oshima’s intended, Yoshie Hayakawa, his pursue the trail, a very different picture emerges.

Oshima had been caught embezzling company funds and was also carrying on with other women, including perhaps Hayakawa’s sister Sayo, who denies the accusation vociferously.  In fact, the film ostensibly hinges on the question of who is telling the truth: Sayo Hayakawa or the witnesses placing her with Oshima.  It all so disillusions Yoshie Hayakawa, she develops a romantic attachment for the actor playing Imamura’s investigator.

Several times during the course of the third act, Imamura directly states that this film is fictional.  He even literally tears down the backdrops he has assembled midway through the climatic confrontation.  Yet audiences are so programmed to accept the documentary form as fact, we still believe when the actors take their “he said-she said” show out into the streets. It is like we can’t stop being had by Imamura.

In many ways, the dramatized docu-hybrid elements of Vanishes seem decades ahead of their time, especially the trippy sequences involving the shaman advising Hayakawa, whose rituals would not be out of place in a straight up genre picture.  On the other hand, the deliberately desynchronized soundtrack harkens back to the Nouvelle Vague’s trick bag.  By the same token, Kenji Ishigura’s black-and-white cinematography faithfully preserves a street level time capsule of Tokyo in the mid 1960’s.

At one point, one of the witnesses contradicting Sayo Hayakawa protests: “I have no reason to lie.”  Essentially, Imamura’s entire film serves as a rejoinder saying: “yes, but you have no reason to tell the truth either.”  Evidently, Vanishes started out legit, but circumstances forced Imamura’s meta-hybrid hand.  Still, the implications regarding the limits of objective filmmaking remain the same.  Imamura would in fact make several more conventional documentaries, but the less politically charged Vanishes, with its woman (or women) scorned, is more thematically compatible with his hardboiled morality plays.  An enigmatic puzzle every cineaste should enjoy chewing on, A Man Vanishes screens free of charge this Saturday (1/18) at the Asia Society, as part of their new Vengeance is Shohei Imamura film series.

Vengeance is Shohei Imamura: Endless Desire

Dig that slinky crime jazz.  Check out those five strangers sidling up to each other in a train station. Even viewers who are inexplicably resistant to subtitled foreign films will appreciate the post-war noir coolness of Shohei Imamura’s Endless Desire (trailer here), which screens for free this Friday as the opening film of the Asia Society’s mini-retrospective, Vengeance is Shohei Imamura.

In the waning hours of the war, Major Hashimoto and three co-conspirators buried a barrel of morphine below a field hospital, vowing to reunite ten years later to claim their illicit goods.  It was dark and circumstances were chaotic, so nobody really knows what their criminal collaborators look like.  They just know to look for Hashimoto and two other men wearing discrete Imperial military pins.  Things get tricky right from the start when Shima Hashimoto arrives in the place of her late brother, greeting four prospective accomplices rather than three.

Obviously, plenty of suspicion falls on all five sketchy characters, but nobody wants to walk away from their share of the morphine stash.  Shima Hashimoto’s destabilizing sultriness further guarantees future violence.  Yet, everybody temporarily buys into the plan to tunnel below the working class neighborhood butcher’s shop unknowingly built over the buried cache.  To make matters worse, unforeseen circumstances impose an accelerated deadline on the desperate rogues.

While it is pretty clear this is all heading for a justly disastrous end, Imamura and Suzuki Toshiro’s adaptation of Shinji Fujiwara’s source novel still delivers several nifty twists and turns along the way.  However, the subplot involving the rather incompetent assistant forced on the five by their temporary landlord (his disappointed father) mostly just muddies the waters with confusing comic relief.  The extent and nature of his slow-wittedness almost seems to vary from scene to scene, but no matter.  Shima Hashimoto is a killer femme fatale from start to finish, which is far more important.

Released in 1958, Desire oozes enough hostile sexual tension to still feel edgy by contemporary standards.  Working with a cast of consummate professionals, Imamura crafts a massively sweaty hothouse atmosphere, perfectly accentuated by Shinsaku Himeda’s classically noir black-and-white cinematography.  This is a nocturnal world, where there is always an eighty-five percent chance of rain.

There is no denying the sizzle Misako Watanabe adds, out vamping Mae West as Ms. Hashimoto.  We can tell she will be trouble right from the first seemingly innocent shot (and she is still making great films, like Japan’s recent foreign language Oscar submission, The Great Passage). Likewise, Taiji Tonoyama serves as a perfect foil to everyone as the bristling, blustering , bull-headed Onuma, while Imamura regular Kô Nishimura provides a nice counterpoint as the more cerebral and calculating Nakada.

Endless Desire is dark, but it is great fun, especially for film noir lovers.  It is an excellent way to start wading into the work of Imamura, which includes many serious documentaries and two Cannes Palme D’Or winners.  Highly recommended, it screens (for free) this Friday (1/17), kicking off the Vengeance is Shohei Imamura series at the Asia Society on Park Avenue.