L'Anguille

The Eel does something so imaginative and effective in the way it tells its story. It really makes the audience interact. Explaining this would ruin its effect, a sort of thing rarely experienced anymore in filmgoing. It's difficult to find movies that actually redirect your thinking and stimulate you and make you suffer in that great, fulfilling way. So, I will leave you to take my word for it. What is amazing about what The Eel does is how it really enlightens the audience when it comes to the judgment and expectations of characters. The Eel probes meticulously and sneakily the strange progression of a person.

Shohei Imamura, the film's cunning, subtle, and seemingly offbeat director, fashions the opening murder with what is in the first nanosecond of reaction aggravating and promptly recognized as a brilliant little effect. As the movie's main character stabs his cheating wife to death after slashing her frightened adulterous lover, blood sprays all over the camera, the scene becoming skewed and blurred through the bloodied lens, forcing us naturally to want to peer around it to see as clearly as we can the violence the character continues to commit. And at that point we realize, as is Imamura's intention, that we are the audience and that there is the movie, and that we are voyeurs who so badly anticipate such things as the passionately vindicating slaughter of a coldly adulterous lover. And from there, Imamura exploits the weakness he knows we have, but in what way cannot be predicted.

Later in the film, Imamura stages a ballistic, ungraceful fight that includes many characters, but with a relentlessly stationary camera. No matter how intricate certain actions get, he refuses to let it be anything more than observed. His intentions are all to make us conscious of what we are thinking as we watch these scenes. It's a creative intelligence applied more and more rarely all the time.

The cast is very carefully balanced. Certain characters are animated, some eccentric, some very stoic, and some are combinations of all three, yet they never become even remote resemblances of clichés. They are all meant to oppose or serve as comparison to each other in nature and chemistry.

Another plus is the film's purposely awkward, infectiously gawky musical score that, like most music in Japanese films, is recurrent and sustained, a repeated series of only a handful of melodies that are very memorable.

This was a very engaging film about a guy who murders his cheating wife and then is released from prison 8 years later. You really find yourself rooting for him--especially when he meets and saves the life of a lady. You really want them to get together,...the problem is, he is SO afraid to open up to people that he distances himself from her and chooses to confide more in his pet eel. It seems that if he does connect to someone on a deeper level, he's afraid he might kill again--though he is clearly a decent person who snapped one time in his life and only after being pushed. It's a great character study and the acting and direction are marvelous--with a few lapses here and there. What didn't I like? Well, it isn't so much the acting that's the problem, but the script. Repeatedly, flashbacks and psychotic-like hallucinations occur. They tend to muddle the basic message and confuse the plot. Without these and without the LARGE amounts of blood in the murder scene, this would have gotten a rating of 9 or even 10.

I actually enjoyed the film a lot. Maybe it's not one of the most articulated films, but there was liveliness in it,and i think that's the reason the eel got cannes. The lives of misunderstood,isolated finds the peace with themselves in a remote country side, reminded me of Mediterriano a bit. The man's murder, suicidal heroine and her mad mother, a guy who is obsessed with UFO, which seems unexplainable and their lives are narrated in a messiest possible way. I think this film is not for analysis or for coming to conclusion, the director wants to show a utopia where misfits can be forgiven and find a harmony with the world, where a human communicates with an eel. And where people can have a chance to get redemption,,,

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.

I tried to spoil my girlfriend, who studies Japanese culture, with a film and it worked! Unagi (the Eal) tells a story of man who commits a 'crime passionelle' by murdering his wife. When he leaves prison the guards bring him 'his' eal. Under supervision of a local priest he tries to live a peaceful peasant-life in a place where nobody knows about his past; he becomes a barber, the eal is his friend ('they never say things you don't like..'). The situation changes when, on instigation of the priest, a girl starts assisting him in his shop. Inevitable his dilemma's come back...

I loved this film for it reminded me much of the films of the Dutch director/producer Alex van Warmerdam; the ordinary, tightly directed up to every detail, the sufficating dilemma's lightly woven thru. Modern drama at it's best!