Quinoa1984

This is an intense drama about how power structures emotionally and spiritually paralyze women (not religious spirit like a deeper spirit than that), and Berit has a whole lot of trauma, and also some dalliances/affairs with other men, that complicate a newfound relationship with a local port worker.

It's not a major Ingmar Bergman film by much of a stretch, in part because some of the issues It's dealing with, like a man who just can't fathom (gasp) that the Love of His Life(TM) had sex with some other men, even as she describes clearly living in an abusive household and this shaping her into a mess looking for affection. Actually, when Bergman shows how things were with Berit's father and mother as a small child, it is harrowing and directed with the kind of precise dramatic shellshock that marked much of his greatest work on film.

Other times, when like the man looks at the camera drunk and talks about metaphors of "jumping ship" and being so miserable with his "goddamned conscience," it gets to being over the top even for a young Bergman still finding hid voice. There are a few scenes like that. But at the same time, there are exquisite scenes and series of shots, like a few of those flashbacks in how he and his cameraman Fischer (a frequent collaborator in years to come) make spaces as dark and desplate and Film-Noit adjacent as anything in Hollywood at the time.

Or like when Berit is in the girl's reformatory and just how he shoots all of those bodies in that one room lying around. You can see he doesn't just have chops, he wants to create this oppressive atmosphere that is still entertaining to watch and engage in, if that makes sense. Even one shot that peers up at some buildings late in the film is memorable.

In other words, Port of Call has some scattered sexual politics, and for its time it must have been daring just to put it all out there let alone in one 97 minute film. It doesn't all work, but enough does to make it worthwhile - that is, if one has already seen like 10 or 12 or even 20 other Bergman films and want to mark this off the list. And Jonnson and Eklund are giving it 110% always.

Waiting Women is a good reminder that the "Minor" works of a writer and director you cherish are where you see the artist's real worth; of course, Ingmar Bergman (and most directors) aren't thinking in those terms when making a movie, it is just another work that they can only hope gets seen by as many eyes and strikes a chord with as much of the public as possible (albeit by this point he hadn't quite made the crossover into American consciousness, that would come a year or so later with Summer with Monika and Smiles of a Summer Night). But there is a great amount of attention paid to making what we are seeing with these characters in these three stories as dynamic as possible, and even if not every story is equally involving it is still a significant film because of Bergman and his crew's care for enticing mis en scene.

There is one part I want to highlight that if you are watching more for the plot is straightforward but for characterization and atmosphere this is where it counts: when Rakel (Anita Bjork) is in her room while her husband is away and Kaj (suave Jarl Kulle) steps in to talk with her, notice where Rakel is sitting and how Bergman uses the mirror in the scene, how the two move and the more it is clear there is a spark of attraction that is much more, how she gets up to go over to him and when he kisses her and she goes for his advances. This is all staged, until he has no choice but to cut to a medium shot, as one long take that lasts aboht three minutes or more, and the staging is so intricate and it all has to be precise while feeling totally natural.

Just this shot alone shows Bergman's progression as a filmmaker at this time, which would only get more sophisticated and daring in the rest of the 1950's, but just this scene and of itself is quietly exhilarating to see how he does it (it helps the two actors are quite good in that scene). The following scene that comes when Rakel tells her husband without waiting that she had an affair with Kaj and his reaction is also a bit of brilliant indifelity theater, and while it is cut and shot more simply there is still the thrill of three actors going through a complicated batch of emotions and betrayals and how an entire marriage has been revealed as rotting due to indifference and a lack of romance.

This and the third story, set primarily in a stuck elevator where a couple have a kind of sad but comic bit of revelation-time about their relationship, are the highlights while the middle story, about a wife revealing about how she had her baby by herself even as she is remembering within the memory that she is recounting of happier (and less happy, even haunted) times with an artist and why she had to have the child on her own, is good if not as compelling as the others. This isn't Nelson's fault so much as there not being enough dramatic meat on the bone in that story, even as (again) Bergman is flexing his filmmaking muscles with moments like when Marta is recounting seeing what looks like Death in a dark room reaching out to her (many journeyman directors would destroy someone to have just a scene like that as far as the trust in dark lighting).

I think it being a sort of Anthology-style work may be what made me think this might be a minor or even lessor sort kf work, as it was not really as available to see until a few years back when it came to Criterion Channel and the Bergman box set (it may have been on VHS but also rare to get), and except for some dialog in the elevator set piece there may not be drama (or comedy) as memorable as in Bergman's most iconic or just wholly lacerating major productions.

But that is a high bar for anyone to hit, and for what this is his script taps into some fine (if maybe unoriginal) insights into how fraught relationships can be and how much men take women for granted in their lives in general. And if you are looking for signs of a director attuned to how to get an audience invested based on where the camera is and where he is telling you to look, this is oddly enough a great place to start if you have not seen his films before.

The Eel is a good kind of surprise as a film primarily if you are familiar with other films by this director; works like Vengeance is Mine, The Insect Woman, even his other Cannes winning The Ballad of Narayama contain a harsh view of humanity, unsparing and pitiless really, especially when it comes to how far human beings will take themselves into dark recesses. This film looks like it will go that way, but that is just in the opening minutes as we see Yamashita commit a brutal act (the always tremendous Yakusho, because he always is doing so much with so little in a natural, observant but commanding manner), and then it cuts ahead years later, out of prison, and he has to just move on with his life.

There is the theme or metaphor or what have you with the eel, and a character or two even try to figure out and explain to Yamashita what an eel represents (fittingly, he does not know fully himself, which is the right character move on Imamura's part), though that is less interesting to me than what hoe Yamashita gradually becomes involved with this small community by this barbershop he works at, not least of which the young woman Keiko (Shimizu, very good here as well, if sometimes asked to go big and melodramatic when that is not her strong suit), who Yamashita saves from ending her own life.

If anything it reminded me not what I sort of thought it might be ala Sling Blade (albeit very very different protagonists) than it is like one of those low-key comedy/dramas that were coming out in the mid to late 90s and into the 2000s in America. Of all things The Station Agent in particular popped in my head as far as this sort of outsider who is befriended by a few people despite the fact that the protagonist is reminded all too much that he may not be fully accepted (if he even wants to be), and a tone that is most interesting precisely because it sort of bobs and weaves (or, if I must go to the eel metaphor, a slippery creature you can never get a handle on) between a lighter comedic tone and something that is melancholic and contemplative about how one forgives onself.

All of this makes the film sound more captivating than it is on the whole since Imamura takes his time with the storytelling, maybe too much (and I know I watched the newly released director's cut but hey that is how he wanted the world to see it), as there is some meandering with a side character obsessed with UFO sightings (again, 1996 for you) and Keiko's mother who pops up for some scenes and feels superfluous. Other developments happen that will eventually snowball by the climax, ie a pregnancy and another parolee who is definitely not doing life after jail the right way (two words: prayer beads), and the film picks up some dramatic steam in the last twenty five minutes or so.

The Eel is a character study more than something that relies on shock value like Imamura's other work, but in a way that may make this his most accessible film, which is ironic given how it begins in a graphically violent set piece (not the amount of blood so much as the frankness of it and what Yamashita does right after the killings). It is almost like we have to decompress and find some sort of... is peace the word? This may take too much time to get to where it is going, but there is also a pleasure in experiencing what Yamashita is going through and what connection he is forming - if not romantic than just having a real friend in Keiko - and Yakusho keeps it grounded to that reality, despite some (odd) dips into surrealism for Imamura. 7.5/10.