Pigs and Battleships

Shôhei Imamura's "Pigs and Battleships" is a very well crafted film. Despite this, it's a very unpleasant film and probably won't appeal to most viewers.

This film is set amid the social chaos that followed World War II in Japan. Now an occupied nation, poverty and crime are rampant. The film specifically focuses on the very lowest elements of society-- grifters, pimps, prostitutes and gangs. They are a uniformly disreputable group of people in the film--and because of that, it's very difficult to care in the least about these folks. And, because you don't really care about them, this makes the film do hard to enjoy. But this isn't necessarily a criticism--Imamura wanted to shock audiences and make social commentary about this as well as the country's ambivalence about having American troops in their land. On one hand, some folks admire the soldiers and think they are the greatest in the world, whereas others see them much like how hyenas view lions--they are just waiting to pick up their scraps. It's all very depressing and awful. The only bright spot is at the end. Following a crazy scene involving death, escaped pigs and total chaos are signs that perhaps ONE damaged soul might just make her escape. Bleak...but powerful.

Hiroyuki Nagato and Jitsuko Yoshimura (in her first onscreen appearance) are very much in love. She wants them to flee to another city; her family has just sold her to be a mistress. He wants to hang around. He's a low-level Yakuza member who's in charge of their new operation; they have a contract to get the scraps off an American destroyer, which will fatten pigs, and he's in charge of the pigs. Much better than moving to another town and being a salaryman! However his gang is in upheaval. Someone has run away with the money for the pigs, the boss thinks he's dying of stomach cancer, and the other gang members are plotting on how to split up the boodle, once they've eliminated the old leader.

It's an expert mixture of farce and drama in the midst of chaos from Shôhei Imamura. He had run with similar gangs during Japan's Black Market era. Then he had gone to work in the movies and his earliest known movies were as an uncredited assistant director of three of Ozu's comedies of life among the upper middle class. It's hard to say what Imamura learned from Ozu, except to do exactly the opposite. Ozu's people love each other and gently guide their family towards socially acceptable goals. Money is never mentioned. the set design is impeccable in that simple Japanese style that Ozu seems to have helped define, and the camera is placed humbly on a tatami mat adoringly to gaze up at the actors in long takes. Imamura sets his story in the docklands outside a US Naval base, where cheap and gaudy bars sit cheek-by-jowl with cheap and gaudy brothels. Everyone talks about money, They're deep in debt, they value other people solely for what they can be hustled into doing for them, and the camera occasionally spirals up in a crane shot to spin around during a gang rape.

The only way to make this a comedy is to despise the characters in the movie, and Imamura does so in the most heartless manner. He pauses occasionally to offer an anthropologist's view of the people of this Pandemonium for his audience. He can afford to; he got out. Are any of the people in this movie smart enough to?

It's really interesting to see one of the early works of Imamura. This film includes epitomes of the overall style of the great director: depiction of the lower, outlaw parts of Japanese society; criticizing both the authority and the society for their conformism with prevailing conditions; use of animals(namely pigs for this film) as an allegory for individuals (here it should be underlined that this object of allegory beats up its master!); and characterizing women as determined individuals who have power within the society, and who are more conscious than men. In order to trace the sources of the stylized director who made brilliant films like Kuroi Ame, Narayama bushiko, and Unagi, this film is a must see.

Typical high school relationship turmoil pales in comparison to this. A young couple are looking for a more prosperous life in early 60s Japan, however, the young man thinks that running with a gang will help him clear some financial debts quick along with selling swine on the black market in the grittier parts of Japan. His girlfriend wants him out of that stupid gang while her parents are far from model parents as they try to steer her into prostitution. The story follows Kinta as he wrestles with becoming a man and trying to find a way out of the gang world as his girlfriend would be happy if he had a traditional factory job; something he bristles at. Will they be able to detach themselves from bad influences or will they collapse under the pressures? This film had really nice shot framing and a few really innovative transitions, especially for the era. The acting was solid and the drama slowly increased built upon well-crafted characters. One key scene has similarities to Scarface but swap cocaine with pigs. Ha Ha.

As context always matters, Imamura makes it not only clear, not subtext but the tex itself, that the Japan of Pigs and Battleships is under an occupation that is a form of Gangsterism. There is a reason the troops are there - they won the war - but the extent to which they are still in Japan 15 years later is not about keeping any kind of peace but a form of taking and taking (Americans = Gangsters? I wasn't born yesterday).

The shots of the battleships bookends the film, and Americans are in the story mostly on the sides, except at one key point about midway through as sexual assaulter brutes who make Haurko (a heartbreaking and very good Yoshimura performance throughout) and young woman who is only with them because she's lost her way and looking for quick money. So, if this is a Crime melodrama, Imamura means to say, involving low level thugs and bad deals involving pigs and their feed and other bad crimes, you can't look at that without seeing what surrounds them all - and more distressing is that (some of) the Japanese citizens *like* the American influence and presence.

This isn't so blunt that Imamura hits us over the head with the message because he couldn't make a dishonest or sentimental turn if he tried. Pigs and Battleships is primarily about Kinto (Nagato), one of those young dudes that can't seem to stop moving his body even when things are (relatively) ok, like there's a low to much higher level anxiety that pervades his mind and spirit. He wants to rise in the ranks with a group of local gangsters, but it doesn't sink in that he'll be the Fall Guy (or maybe it does and he just wants to get all the money he can).

This position he's in doesn't sit well with Haruko, who loves him completely against her better judgment and wants him to go away with her. If she had seen a movie before she might know better, but it doesn't look like many (good) movies play around them, but I digress. Point is, Kinto is the kind of screwed that he doesn't fully know it, and his descent into criminality is more pathetic than tragic until it goes beyond that stage, while Haruko goes through her own foolish acts like with the American sailors. Meanwhile, the Boss of the group is for much of the story thinking he's dying - stomach cancer, but its really an ulcer - and is the one part of the story I'm still thinking about (as in, is it meant to be funny or just kind of sad or whatever).

All of this is shot in continually immersive and impressive long takes and wide shots where Imamura not only knows but cares about how we are seeing people in the frames; often these are when Kinto and Haruko are in a room with others who are using them, be it Kinto with his gangster (would be) pals or Haruko with a group of prostitutes who are in their own form of exploitation. He moves it when he has to and when he does you can be sure that its meant to keep us dramatically or thematically hooked (I liked the one shot that is wide for a few minutes and then moves in on the boy reading about Japanese history, it just feels impactful on some level I have to keep thinking about it a good way).

As I said, the only part that didn't quite work for me is the subplot with the Boss and his cancer-not-cancer, but it doesn't take away from what does. The kind of character of Kinto is sympathetic, even when he puts himself deeper into this group who would love nothing more than to see him go to jail to cover up their crimes and to not be seen again, and when we think he's lost he comes back with his declaration that he'll finally quit... but of course he has to do One More Thing and we all know that never goes well. But what's so incredible is where Imamura takes this in the final act, as those trucks of pigs get taken along on a chase that leads to the red light district, and that's where I have to stop typing to give away what brilliant chaos you have to see for yourself.

Pigs and Battleships has a kind of cunning to ot because Imamura is using the sort of cinematic grammar that I'd expect more in Western/American films, such as those long wide shots (I thought of John Ford only he'd never make something as gritty as this), and he's using that language in a film that is directly about how much Japanese citizens have lost their souls to another kind of Imperial rule. The black and white cinematography is dark and brooding, like Film Noir stretched at points into a nightmare of itself. And as the film goes into its final reel, Nagato makes his Kinto into this damned creature with that machine gun and there's a wildness and abandon that is only extreme in what he ultimately does, but he is still painfully human and damaged. This is a scathing social critique and a highly entertaining crime melodrama with a few really big laughs.