Yakusho Koji: Perfect Roles | Out Of Competition
Japan, 1997, 117’, Japanese
Directed by: Imamura Shohei
Screenplay: Imamura Shohei, Tomikawa Motofumi, Tengan Daisuke
Cinematography (color): Komatsubara Shigeru
Editing: Okayasu Hajime
Production Design: Inagaki Hisao
Music: Ikebe Shinichiro
Producer: Iino Hisashi
Executive Producer: Okuyama Kazuyoshi
Cast: Yakusho Koji, Shimizu Misa, Baisho Mitsuko
Date of First Release in Territory: May 24th, 1997
When he released
The Eel in 1997 Imamura Shohei was among the most internationally celebrated of living Japanese directors but slowed by illness and occupied with running his film school, now called the Japan Institute of the Moving Image, he had allowed seven years to lapse since making
Black Rain, his 1989 drama about the postwar lives of a family of Hiroshima atomic bombing victims.
The second of his films to win the Cannes Palme d’Or (
The Ballad of Narayama was the first, in 1984),
The Eel centers on an ex-convict, Yamashita Takuro (Yakusho Koji), who has just been paroled after serving a sentence for murder. Eight years earlier he stabbed his wife to death after discovering her with a lover. Once an ordinary man leading an ordinary life, he has been transformed into a loner who distrusts humanity, the female half of it in particular, and communicates only with an eel that he kept as a pet in his cell.
Released into the care of his former teacher, who is now a priest at a rural Buddhist temple, Yamashita takes up barbering and sets up shop outside of town, by the shores of a lake. Though off the beaten path, his shop soon attracts the locals, including a laborer who takes him eel fishing (Yamashita throws his catch back into the lake) and a construction worker who uses Yamashita’s revolving barber pole to attract UFOs (none arrive).
Yamashita’s most fateful encounter is with Keiko (Shimizu Misa), a woman he finds unconscious in the weeds by the lake after taking an overdose of sleeping pills. When she recovers from her suicide attempt, Keiko announces that she doesn’t want to return home to Tokyo. The priest’s wife (Baisho Mitsuko) suggests that she work in Yamashita’s shop as his assistant.
At first opposed to the idea – Keiko reminds him of his dead wife – Yamashita at last agrees. Slowly, he begins to open up to her and the possibility of trust in another human being.
The film’s populist strain – its delight in low humor and its preference for the warmly emotional over the coolly rational – recalls the films of Yamada Yoji, especially the 46th installment of his iconic Tora-san series, in which the title wandering peddler falls for a pretty barber, and Yamada’s 1977 hit
The Yellow Handkerchief, in which an ex-convict discovers love’s redeeming power.
But in contrast to Yamada’s celebration of family and community – even his outsider hero, Tora, always returns to the familial home – Imamura rejects middle-class morality while exploring the unruly impulses of the loins and heart, the impulse to kill among them.
In depicting the cheating wife in bed with another man, while the cuckolded Yamashita watches from a bedroom window, the film is almost pornographically frank. But the scene also illuminates Yamashita’s motivation for his crime. We see what he sees from inside his skin.
Yakusho Koji, who had recently risen to stardom in Suo Masayuki’s 1996 international hit
Shall We Dance?, and Shimizu Misa, acclaimed for her portrayal of gay couple’s friend in Nakajima Takehiro’s 1992
Okoge, deftly build the foundations of the film’s central relationship, while laying bare their characters’ wounded human cores.
In a pre-Cannes press conference, Imamura said “More than winning a prize, I want to show that Japanese films are still alive and well.” In
The Eel, he not only brilliantly succeeded in that aim but also reasserted his own position in global cinema’s front ranks.
Imamura Shohei
Imamura Shohei (1926-2006) studied stage-drama direction while at Waseda University. However, seeing Kurosawa Akira’s Drunken Angel attracted him to the realm of visual images. After graduating from Waseda University in 1951, he entered Shochiku’s Ofuna Studios as an assistant director. After working with such great directors as Nomura Yoshitaro, Oba Hideo and Shibuya Minoru, he followed Kawashima Yuzo in shifting to Nikkatsu. Imamura has made many powerful dramas by looking squarely at humans in his special way ever since his debut with Stolen Desire (1958).
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
1958 – Endless Desire
1963 – The Insect Woman
1979 – Vengeance Is Mine
1983 – The Ballad of Narayama
1989 – Black Rain
1997 – The Eel
1998 – Dr. Akagi
2001 – Warm Water Under a Red Bridge