Zegen

Zegen is a dark satire with adventure, comedy and drama elements directed by veteran Imamura Shohei. The movie tells the story of a Japanese man living abroad for more than forty years. He escapes from a ship where he has done tough manual labour with two friends for several years to seek a better life in Hong Kong. He initially becomes a shopkeeper and hairdresser before he gets hired as a spy who is sent to Manchuria. His mission ends in a disaster and he returns to Hong Kong as a disillusioned man. Brainwashed with patriotistic propaganda, he decides to free a group of Japanese women who have been kidnapped by pirates to work as prostitutes. He aspires to change their lives for the better but soon realizes that they need to continue to work as prostitutes to make ends meet. The protagonist soon becomes a pimp who builds Japanese brothels all across Asia while waiting for his empire's army to conquer the continent. When he faces increased opposition from locals and his lover leaves him for a Chinese pirate, he decides to impregnate as many prostitutes as possible in order to populate foreign countries with Japanese children. His ambitious dream approaches reality when he retreats to Malaysia with his many children and witnesses how Japanese troops conquer the idyllic island he is living on.

Zegen makes me think of the epic adventure story Papillon due to its diversified story taking place over several decades, its intriguingly adventurous locations and colourful characters. This movie here is however a satire rather than a drama. It shows how a simple labourer gets brainwashed and becomes a zealous patriot who is completely detached from reality. This is one of the few Japanese movies that seems to criticize its country's megalomaniac ambitions during Meiji, Taisho and Showa eras from the beginning of the twentieth century to the Second World War. The movie covers numerous genres as we get a vibrant mixture of adventure, comedy and drama. Due to the fact that half of the movie takes place in brothels, the film features much nudity and shouldn't be watched by children or teenagers. However, the nudity isn't simply used to show some skin but to portray what life in brothels actually was like. The movie is so creative, detailed and surprising that it would have deserved to be adapated into a television series or even a novel series.

In the end, Zegen is a satire with vibrant characters, stunning locations and a quirky plot that comes around with quite a few surprises. Despite a few minor lengths in the second half, this movie is so creative, detailed and entertaining that it almost requests multiple views. Anyone who likes historic adventure movies such as Papillon should definitely give Imamura Shohei's timeless masterpiece Zegen a chance.

This movie is black satire of Japanese imperial ambitions in the 20th century. In Meiji era Japan (1868-1910), the Japanese state sought to establish itself as an empire as a way to both catch up to and remain free from the West. These activities also lay the foundation for the disasters to come mid-century. This movie satirizes those efforts from a mid-1980s perspective, giving it an obvious subtext of being a commentary on the efforts of late 20th century Japanese businessmen abroad as well. The "hero" is a businessman who, realizing that the Japanese armed forces will likely soon be advancing across Asia, decides that they will require brothels wherever they go as well and so sets up shop in Southeast Asia. A very black comedy from one of Japan's finest film satirists (cf. "Pigs and Battleships," "The Pornographers") best known abroad ca. 1999 for "The Eel" and "Black Rain" (the film based on the novel about Hiroshima, not the Michael Douglas flick).

Japanese director Shôhei Imamura may be best known for his cold and serious films, but over the course of his career he also tackled comedy, albeit in a very dark manner. One of his later films, Zegen tells the reality-based story of Iheiji Muraoka (Ken Ogata), a poor Japanese man who immigrates to Hong Kong at the turn of the 20th century to seek work in order to slowly regain the past glory of his family. Making a living as a barber at first, Muraoka is soon recruited to work as a spy against the Russians and develops an extremely strong sense of patriotism after to the example of his commander, Captain Uehara (Hiroyuki Konishi). After semi-accidentally becoming a human trafficker, he gets the idea of setting up brothels for the benefit of the Emperor, eventually expanding his businesses across South-East Asia. The changing political climate keeps causing troubles for his ventures, however.

Imamura tells the tale of the "Japanese Dream" of booming pre-war economics through exaggeration and satire: Muraoka's obsessive attempts of honouring his country are seen as fussy and comical and the constant presence of giggling prostitutes also strengthens the sense of laughableness that surrounds Imamura's trusted actor Ken Ogata in the lead role. On the other hand, the relationship of Iheiji's sensible lover Shiho (Mitsuko Baisho), also a prostitute, and a rivaling pimp Wang (Chun Hsiung Ko) brings a feel of sadness in the story, as does the general idea of girls leaving their homes or being kidnapped to work as prostitutes overseas, even if the characters are too keen on their daily bumblings to ever realize it. The satirical aspects become perhaps the most obvious during the final 15 minutes or so, when Muraoka has finally lost his grip on reality in the pressures of honour. At this point, he has moved from laughable to pathetic – Imamura's commentary on economy and patriotism replacing common sense is not left unclear.

True to his style, Imamura doesn't do much to cover up the omnipresent sexuality and casual nudity that defines the lives of the women in the brothels. The yellowish hues of many interior scenes create a mood of crampedness that is contrasted by beautiful outdoor shots of things like blizzards, sunsets or fog during Muraoka's trips outside his brothels. Besides the well-thought visuals, the music by Shinichirô Ikebe fits in the mood too, although used rather sparingly.

Even though the loud style of acting takes some time to get used to and the story feels a tad too long at over two hours, in the end I think the colourful performances and the period piece atmosphere are worth seeing for friends of Japanese cinema. Since the theme of uncontrollable urge for entrepreneurship is still very relevant too, Zegen can be recommended to those interested in Imamura's development as a director, even though personally I still prefer the more intimate Unholy Desire (1964), his cruel but excellent examination of emotional abuse in relationships.

An epic and investigation into the complex relationship between the "black market" and the government, not knowing where one begins and the other ends. Also about how the nation's discourse can blind and legitimize the filthiest practices that can exist. The quixotic figure of the protagonist, bordering on the romantic, demonstrates a stereotype of a distorted nationalism at the same time that he is the reflection of a person who was deceived and betrayed by the very State he defended, showing (perhaps) that in the world the structure of power does not he cares about principles, but only about pragmatic measures to achieve his plans for power. The protagonist represents the man who believes he is a fascist, but who is just a puppet of the real fascist, who can throw him in the trash at any time. Without limiting the relationship between man and nation, crime and state with a fine line, we also see layers of criticism of imperialism and economic forms of domination of countries.

Imamura Shohei is not, perhaps, if one has seen films like Vengeance Is Mine, Intentions Of Murder, Insect Woman or Karayuki-San, the first choice one might imagine to have made such a richly comedic masterpiece of Japanese (hyper-)nationalist satire as this. Yet, the above films are not only helpful, but darn near essential viewing in order to grasp the full flavour of what Imamura has made out of his (and Ogata's) Quixote figure, the Holy Fool who is so blindly faithful to his nation and his 'great cause', and who commits deeds for them that should, if properly viewed, elicit all of profound horror, chaotic laughter and even tearful sympathetic empathy. For if one is unaware of the bitter truths of the Japanese woman of the Meiji era unwittingly sold into prostitution by their families, as documented in Karayuki-San, then an entire layer of the film is lost in the idea of a fictional man who could have, in Imamura's vision, founded such a system in the course of no less than a dream of the great glory of his country.

Yet, this is not to say that the film cannot be enjoyed without such a background. The satire is sharp, yet the comedy itself is broad and the arc of Ogata's Muraoka is one of the most complete and all-encompassingly humanist character portrayals in all Japanese film. Imamura is used to portraying men as scoundrels, as victimisers, murderers, petty thieves and calculating demons; Muraoka is all of these things and yet none of them. He cannot be defined by any single characteristic any more than any non-fictional being could; yet, he can stand alone or for the entirety of Japanese culture, as well as for any other great figure in Imamura's work (and, dare I say it, either male or female). The characters with whom he interacts, too, are at turns majestic and base, glorious and vainglorious, realistic and archetypal, and likewise acted just as well, from the indelible figure of Muraoka's Dulcinea, Shiho (a name that seems to bear a profound resemblance to Imamura's own), a part just as well-portrayed as Ogata's, to every third-rate would-be pimp and whore they come in contact (and, my heavens, there are a lot of them!) over the span of some forty-odd (very odd, indeed) years in the brothels, mansions, ships and huts of the film.

Whoever you are reading this, you are doing yourself a disservice in not seeing this film. This is, I have no doubt, one of the as-yet-undiscovered-masterpieces of world cinema, a testament to the ability of film to provide insights which no other media can provide as succinctly and as tellingly as a pristine performance within a perfect story told by an incomparable storyteller. In the twenty years since Zegen, I cannot think of a film so passionately yet simply told, so worthy of praise. It is an echo of Cervantes and of Welles, the author and greatest interpreted of the Don Quixote tale, and deserving of rank amongst them as great filmic literature.

—Marc-David Jacobs