L'Anguille

THE EEL borders on dark humour when a man, who after eight years in prison for the murder of his wife, is released from jail. He sets himself up in a barber shop by the river and trouble comes knocking on his door and he can not seem to get away from it. Simple, yet effective, a very mature piece of work and pleasing overall.

Takuro Yamashita, played very effectively by Koji Yakusho, gets an anonymous letter telling him that his young, pretty wife is entertaining another man while he is out fishing at night, this after she lovingly prepares and packs his supper. He goes fishing but returns home early in time to catch her in medias res. In a cold rage he knifes her to death. He bicycles to the police station and turns himself in. Eight years later he gets out of prison. This is where our story begins.

Yamashita, now embittered toward others, especially women, is on parole. He sets up a barber shop in a small town. He keeps a pet eel because he feels that the eel "listens" to him when he talks. One day he discovers a woman (Keiko Hattari, played by the beautiful Misa Shimizu) in some nearby bushes who has taken an overdose in a suicide attempt. He brings the police to her and she is saved. She becomes his helper at the barber shop and is so efficient that the barber shop prospers. She falls in love with him but because of his shame and bitterness, he cannot return her love.

This is a film about human sexuality. It is not pretty. The eel itself (a wet "snake") symbolizes sexuality. When this sexuality is confined it is under control. When it is let loose it is dark and deep and mysterious. Director Shohei Imamura's technique is plodding at times, and striking at others. His women are aggressive sexually even though they may look like little girls. His men can be brutal. Their emotions, confined by society as the eel is confined by its tank, sometimes burst out violently.

For many viewers the pace of this film will be too slow, and for others the sexuality depicted will offend. For myself and others who are accustomed to seeing the faces of the players in long close ups on TV and in Western movies, Imamura's medium shots and disinclination to linger on the countenances of his actors will disappoint. Yakusho's face suggests the very depth and mystery that Imamura is aiming at, yet I don't think the camera lingers there enough. Also disappointing is how little we really see of Misa Shimizu's expressions. Chiho Terada, who plays the murdered wife, is also very pretty and completely convincing, but we see little of her. Her expression just before dying, a combination of shamelessness and resignation, funereal acceptance even, was unforgettable.

This is very much worth seeing, but expect to be annoyed by the how slowly it unravels and by the central character's stubborn refusal to forgive both himself and his late wife and his inability to embrace the life that is now his.

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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 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 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.