Eijanaika

The opening film of this year's Japanese Film Festival, Shohei Imamura's Eijanaika was a mixed bag, but the opening is one to behold. Very noisy and extremely boisterous and colourful, there's a carnival like atmosphere in visiting the street markets, with its strange and curious looking circus like performers (see a snake being eaten alive, I kid you not), and others like a peep show for dirty old men.

Like the noisy nature of the street market, what I found distracting with Eijanaika is its lack of focus. Set during the time just before the Meiji Restoration, with the grip of Shoguns going into decline, and with foreign powers already set foot on the land of the rising sun, it has many facets on the corrupt ways and the power play between warlords, scheming and plotting against each other to gain a foothold of fame and fortune.

But anchoring the movie is the theme of love between the characters Genji (Shigeru Izumiya) and Ine (Kaori Momoi), though it's a strange love, which only gets weirder once it addresses its issue on jealousy, and embarks on a journey of manipulation, and sacrifice. Genji has spent 6 years in America, and upon arrival in Japan, finds himself like a fish out of water. He looks up his abandoned wife Genji, who is now a top performing showgirl in one of those peep shows, being sold against her wishes to a master, and has to pay off her debt. But this master-performer relationship might be more than meets the eye as Genji finds out, given her reluctance to leave with him and follow a dream of carving out a new life in America.

Somehow you'll loathe Ine's character, that slowly and surely you discover that she's quite a loose woman, using her charms and body to exact her wishes. But you doubt her true love for Genji no longer when you witness the amount of crap she has to go through for her man, despite his being unappreciative of the fact initially (though it's hard of course). Living a new life and going out of her comfort zone might be too much for the unskilled Ine, and perchance that's why the spurning of Genji's dream to live abroad, going back to where he came from and had experienced.

Like I mentioned, the narrative felt a bit too scattered with many characters and subplots, involving diabolical scheming no less, to give it a easier flow to follow. But appreciated was the fact that Imamura had instilled within the film some physical comedy involving a band of robbers, who after experiencing the success of their first hit, couldn't conceal their addiction for more.

The finale reminded me of Paprika, with plenty of song, dance, color and sheer shenanigans, involving mooning and peeing (this you just gotta see), but I thought it lost the plot with its firing on all cylinders on all parts of the target, rather than zooming in on critical areas and grouping the shots.

It's 1866. Genji returns to Japan after six years in America. He's told that his wife had been sold. It's the turbulent end of the Edo era but filmmaker Shôhei Imamura follows the lowly common man.

I am interested in Genji and Ine. I like this lower class Japan. It's not something that I've seen before. The story is somewhat chaotic. There is a lot going on. I would like to have less. I do like the crass ugliness and its beauty. This has good energy.

Shigeru Izumiya returns from shipwreck and a sojourn in America to Japan in the chaos of the Meiji Restoration. He escapes from prison, searches out his wife, Kaori Momoi, who had been sold by her parents to the perpetual carnival outside of Tokyo. They struggle to reconnect, and eventually gain a tentative foothold, only to see it vanish in the last thrashings of the Shogunate.

Shôhei Imamura had taken a decade off from narrative movies to direct documentaries. He had returned to fiction in 1979, but his focus was still on the underclass, and the chaos they live amidst. As his leads struggle and fall, and cease to care, Imamura's focus is on their futile efforts to find some happiness, and the uncaring brutality of their rulers. It's a long journey from Kurosawa's noble samurai and traditional Japanese insistence on dedication to the nation to this frequently shocking movie, but the director's focus and viewpoint are compelling.

TCM's Alicia Malone described this Shohei Imamura film as, among other things, "grotesque" and "messy". To that I would add too long and confusing. At no point could I fully understand what was going on in 1860s Japan as portrayed in this film. Were the peasants betrayed by both their own leaders as well as the Shogunate? Why was the film's hero imprisoned at the start of the film and how did he gain his release? Was it just me or was there a scene where Ine is found drowned only for her to appear later on? I'm sure that if I were to have grown up in Japan these things would have been clearer to me but I didn't and they weren't. Add a plethora of rather dull subsidiary gangster characters and Imamura's annoying habit of taking us away from the interesting central conflict that is the dysfunctional Ine/Genji marriage to dwell on these vacuous, amoral folks, for whom we care not one jot or tittle, and you can understand why I pulled the plug about ninety minutes in and would have done so sooner were it not for the respect I have for the director of "Insect Woman". C plus.

This busy, hectic movie is a bit hard to follow. Like a Mardi Gras film, with political confrontation, and wild swirling colors. But not as subtle or as personal as Nianchan (My Second Brother), Unagi (The Eel) or Narayama bushiko (The Ballad of Narayama) by Shohei Imamura.