PIGS, PIMPS & Prostitutes: 3 Films by Shohei Imamura
Like his contemporary Nagisa Oshima, whose tidily transgressive “In the Realm of the Senses” reappeared on DVD a few weeks ago, Shohei Imamura is fascinated by the disruptive power of human sexuality. Throughout “Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes,” a boxed set of three early Imamura films from Criterion, carnal desire runs gloriously wild, upsetting all the rules and regulations that society has set up to contain it.
“Pigs and Battleships,” the 1961 film that established Imamura as an artist, captures the chaos of rampant desire in an unforgettable image: hundreds of squealing pigs, escaped from a black-market convoy, flood the streets of the red-light district of Yokosuka, a Japanese port near a United States naval base. Despite the best efforts of the local gangsters and the American shore patrol to keep order — and lead Japan into a bright future of capitalist prosperity — primal needs cannot be repressed.
For Imamura the attempt to suppress human nature is a rich source of both comedy and tragedy, modes he blends so expertly that they become almost indistinguishable.
In “The Insect Woman” (1963), Tome (Sachiko Hidari), a peasant woman born in 1918 survives the remnants of feudalism (she is expected to service the master of the estate), the rise of militarism (she happily goes to work in a factory, providing materiel for the war effort) and the imposition of American free-market capitalism (she becomes an independent businesswoman, operating a very modern call-girl service). Her unreflective need to keep moving forward is both an inspiring embodiment of the life force and an appalling example of unstoppable appetite.
Imamura began in the film business as an assistant to Yasujiro Ozu, whose serene, orderly films about family obligation the young Imamura duly despised. “Intentions of Murder” (1964), the most fully realized work in this collection, begins as a brutal parody of an Ozu film: a series of still shots of trees, rooftops and interiors in a middle-class neighborhood near a railway line.
But this is not Ozu’s world: dark, cramped, littered with garbage, the neighborhood looks more like an animal pen than a human habitation. As in many Ozu films the central figure is a dutiful young woman: Sadako, played with stolid tenacity by Masumi Harukawa. Here, however, family bonds feel more like shackles of exploitation.
A former maid, Sadako is treated with open contempt by her husband, a petty bureaucrat at the local library, and tolerated by her mother-in-law only because she has produced a male heir. Sadako’s sole opportunity for escape arrives in the dubious form of a housebreaker who forces himself on her and soon becomes another unwanted male dependent.
Filming in widescreen black-and-white, Imamura violates every rule of classical composition: his frames are crowded and off kilter, offering only partial views of the action where classical directors like Ozu or Mizoguchi would insist on balance and lucidity. Although Imamura would tame his anarchic style as he aged — his last feature film, the 2001 “Warm Water Under a Red Bridge,” is an amused, mellow treatment of his persistent theme of sexual energy — his work here is ferocious, implacable, bitter and brilliant. (Criterion Collection, $79.95, not rated)
Da The New York Times, 24 maggio 2009
