Item #: 6530 Category: JAPANESE Format: VHS MPAA Rating: R

Woolly Rating: 4/10 (127 votes)

MEMBER COMMENTS ON THIS VIDEO

Kevin Rayburn

Mar 5, 2002 @ 18:31:23

A bit slippery
Shohei Imamura is the present elder statesman of Japanese cinema. 1997's "The Eel" finds him somewhat mellowed, although the identifiable quirkiness and obscurities of his narratives still remain. And so do the motifs. In his 1966 film "The Pornographers" one of the characters was a landlady whose aquarium carp embodied, in her mind, the reincarnated spirit of her dead husband. In a sense, the long, slimy, heavy breathing fish was her conscience: she based what she did on what the carp would "think" about it. It's hard to form new relationships, for instance, if you think your husband's in a fishbowl watching. In "The Eel" the passive snake-like creature serves much the same purpose. As long as the eel is around, the main character, Takuro (Koji Yakusho, who was memorable as the introverted salaryman in Shall We Dance?) can relate to it in a one-way dialogue that serves as a substitute for relationships with actual people. It makes him "stay good" and out of trouble. And he has to stay out of trouble because he's on a two-year parole after serving 8 years for a crime of passion. At the beginning of the film we see that crime. Someone (we never find out who) warns Takuro that his wife is cheating on him while he's off on his nightly fishing trips (fish again!) Seems somebody else is slipping his high hard eel into her on a regular basis. He kills her in jealous rage, and when he gets out of prison he is still shell shocked; completely unable to relate to people, and completely averse to women. "The Eel" is mostly about his long slow process of recovery. It's also sorta like "Kung Fu" and "The Incredible Hulk" because Takuro is repeatedly tempted to get involved in things that could bring out his rages and return him jail on a parole violation. The tensions rise when a young woman, not unlike his dead wife, comes into his life as his barber-shop assistant. The man who once knifed his wife (in a grisly blood-spurting scene at the film's beginning) is now wielding the shaving blade and scissors on the rubes of a small Podunk fishing village. Along the way, we are acquainted with several of the village eccentrics, including one who borrows Takuro's barber pole to create an absurd lighted contraption inside a crop circle in order to attract UFOs. Like Takuro, the man can't relate to humans, hoping the aliens will come and take him away. There are odd, unexplained things that happen as the tale unfolds, including a flash of lights during a key scene when the young woman learns that Takuro was a killer. Is this a UFO? In another scene, the woman is almost raped, but nothing of consequence follows from it. Despite a couple of moments of intense violence and very hot sex (Imamura knows how to stage very intense erotic scenes), the film is mostly a genteel character study and look at village life. It's also a story about the young woman, who is herself recovering from a shell-shocked past while trying to understand and heal Takuro. The film becomes heavily plot driven near the end, when the fate of the young woman's inheritance money and the evil intentions of her thug ex-boyfriend lead to a raucous and oddly comical free-for-all fight in the barber shop. "The Eel" ends with a sense of closure, even as its story is incomplete. The finale is a concession to hope from a director who usually prefers the bleak. For an Imamura film, "The Eel" is relatively more watchable than most, but that isn't saying I really liked it much. If you like the studied quirkiness of someone like, say, "Beat" Takeshi Kitano or the artsy oddness of something like "Himatsuri," then "The Eel" might be right up your alley. I'm going to have to let this "Eel" slither around in my brain a bit more... **THE EEL c. 2002 Kevin Rayburn earthgroove1@yahoo.com

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