La anguila

This was a very engaging film about a guy who murders his cheating wife and then is released from prison 8 years later. You really find yourself rooting for him--especially when he meets and saves the life of a lady. You really want them to get together,...the problem is, he is SO afraid to open up to people that he distances himself from her and chooses to confide more in his pet eel. It seems that if he does connect to someone on a deeper level, he's afraid he might kill again--though he is clearly a decent person who snapped one time in his life and only after being pushed. It's a great character study and the acting and direction are marvelous--with a few lapses here and there. What didn't I like? Well, it isn't so much the acting that's the problem, but the script. Repeatedly, flashbacks and psychotic-like hallucinations occur. They tend to muddle the basic message and confuse the plot. Without these and without the LARGE amounts of blood in the murder scene, this would have gotten a rating of 9 or even 10.

Before "The eel" I saw two other films of Shohei Imamura. "The ballad of Narayama" (1983), who won the Palme d'or in Cannes, and "Black rain" (1989). Imamura belongs to the new wave generation of Japanese directors after the war generation (Kurosawa, Ozu and Mizoguchi) and the post war generation (Kobayashi, Ichikawa and Shindo) had put Japanese films firmly on the map of the world of cinema. Imamura was at its peak during the eighthes (beginning with "Vengeance is mine" (1979)) and nineties (ending with "The eel" (1997)).

With "The eel" Imamura won the Palm d'or for the second time and it was also a favorite movie of a film teacher regularly performing in my local arthouse cinema. Especially the last mentioned reason made me curious to see the film.

"The eel" is a film about crime, punishment and redemption. Especially about redemption as the crime and punishment elements are dealt with in the first quarter of the movie. A man finds out about the adultery of his wife, murders her in a fit of rage, turns himself in to the police and serves eight years in prison.

His release from prison is in effect the real beginning of the movie. It is obvious that the man (Takura played by Koji Yakusho who also played in "Shall we dance?" (Masayuki Suo) the year before) has been damaged psychologically. When released he continued to walk at marching pace for a while and he only talks to his pet eel.

After a while he meets a woman (Keiko played by Misa Shimizu). She obviously likes him, but he keeps treating her very detached. When she makes him a lunch box for his fishing trip he simply refuses to accept. What is the reason behind his behaviour? Resembles the new woman his former wife too much? After all his former wife also made a lunch box for his fishing trips and subsequently betrayed him with her lover when he was out fishing. Or does he no longer trusts himself in a relationship with a woman? Is he of the opinion that he does not deserve a second chance in love? And what about the woman? Why does she hang on to a man that treats her so coldly?

A lot of questions about these two persons slowly growing towards each other and towards a normal life. The problem is not so much that the film does not give clear cut answers. The problem is that the film distracts too much from this (in my opinion central) relationship by a lot of crazy actions by crazy people, especially in the last 30 minutes.

Finally a compliment for the photograpy. Making beautiful images of a beautiful landscape is easy. Making beautiful images of a somewhat littery landscape is much harder. The images of the nightly fishing expeditions after the release from prison are very atmospheric.

I actually enjoyed the film a lot. Maybe it's not one of the most articulated films, but there was liveliness in it,and i think that's the reason the eel got cannes. The lives of misunderstood,isolated finds the peace with themselves in a remote country side, reminded me of Mediterriano a bit. The man's murder, suicidal heroine and her mad mother, a guy who is obsessed with UFO, which seems unexplainable and their lives are narrated in a messiest possible way. I think this film is not for analysis or for coming to conclusion, the director wants to show a utopia where misfits can be forgiven and find a harmony with the world, where a human communicates with an eel. And where people can have a chance to get redemption,,,

The Eel does something so imaginative and effective in the way it tells its story. It really makes the audience interact. Explaining this would ruin its effect, a sort of thing rarely experienced anymore in filmgoing. It's difficult to find movies that actually redirect your thinking and stimulate you and make you suffer in that great, fulfilling way. So, I will leave you to take my word for it. What is amazing about what The Eel does is how it really enlightens the audience when it comes to the judgment and expectations of characters. The Eel probes meticulously and sneakily the strange progression of a person.

Shohei Imamura, the film's cunning, subtle, and seemingly offbeat director, fashions the opening murder with what is in the first nanosecond of reaction aggravating and promptly recognized as a brilliant little effect. As the movie's main character stabs his cheating wife to death after slashing her frightened adulterous lover, blood sprays all over the camera, the scene becoming skewed and blurred through the bloodied lens, forcing us naturally to want to peer around it to see as clearly as we can the violence the character continues to commit. And at that point we realize, as is Imamura's intention, that we are the audience and that there is the movie, and that we are voyeurs who so badly anticipate such things as the passionately vindicating slaughter of a coldly adulterous lover. And from there, Imamura exploits the weakness he knows we have, but in what way cannot be predicted.

Later in the film, Imamura stages a ballistic, ungraceful fight that includes many characters, but with a relentlessly stationary camera. No matter how intricate certain actions get, he refuses to let it be anything more than observed. His intentions are all to make us conscious of what we are thinking as we watch these scenes. It's a creative intelligence applied more and more rarely all the time.

The cast is very carefully balanced. Certain characters are animated, some eccentric, some very stoic, and some are combinations of all three, yet they never become even remote resemblances of clichés. They are all meant to oppose or serve as comparison to each other in nature and chemistry.

Another plus is the film's purposely awkward, infectiously gawky musical score that, like most music in Japanese films, is recurrent and sustained, a repeated series of only a handful of melodies that are very memorable.

I tried to spoil my girlfriend, who studies Japanese culture, with a film and it worked! Unagi (the Eal) tells a story of man who commits a 'crime passionelle' by murdering his wife. When he leaves prison the guards bring him 'his' eal. Under supervision of a local priest he tries to live a peaceful peasant-life in a place where nobody knows about his past; he becomes a barber, the eal is his friend ('they never say things you don't like..'). The situation changes when, on instigation of the priest, a girl starts assisting him in his shop. Inevitable his dilemma's come back...

I loved this film for it reminded me much of the films of the Dutch director/producer Alex van Warmerdam; the ordinary, tightly directed up to every detail, the sufficating dilemma's lightly woven thru. Modern drama at it's best!