93 The Eel

[Finch]

After serving time in prison for murdering his unfaithful wife, Yamashita (Koji Yakusho, Perfect Days, Cure) is released on parole, accompanied only by his pet eel. Hoping to stay out of trouble, he takes over a rural barber shop that quickly becomes a gathering point for the eccentric locals. However, the discovery of a woman’s failed suicide starts a chain reaction that brings back past demons - and not just his own. The Eel won master filmmaker Shohei Imamura his second Palme d’Or, after 1983’s The Ballad of Narayama and was the breakthrough of its star Yakusho.

LIMITED EDITION BLU-RAY FEATURES

High-Definition digital transfer

Uncompressed mono PCM audio

Interview with critic Tony Rayns (2024)

Interview with screenwriter Daisuke Tengan (2024)

Visual essay by Tom Mes on the year 1997 as a turning point in Japanese cinema (2024)

Trailer

Newly improved English subtitle translation

Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow

Limited edition booklet featuring a newly translated archival interview with Imamura

Limited edition of 3000 copies, presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings

US/UK

[domino harvey]

Nice, didn’t get to this one in the Cannes project. Made Cahiers Top 10 list too

[Mr Sausage]

This always felt like lesser Imamura to me, so it’s weird to me that this was his big international breakthrough. Of his post-80s work, Dr. Akagi strikes me as maybe the most interesting and tonally diverse. The Eel is more straightforward, lacking the level of complexity Imamura so often brought to his material. There isn’t as much to plumb.

I don’t mean to be down on the movie—it is very good, and I’m happy Radiance are releasing it; but it’s not the movie I would want Imamura’s reputation tied to in the public eye.

[ex-cowboy]

Whilst I agree it's maybe not quite up there with Imamura's best work, in some ways it's less weird this being his breakout than something like Narayama (which, depending on which audience(s) we're talking about, can be considered his real international breakthrough as his first palme d'or winner). Barring the early scene(s), it's actually quite a gentle drama. I still have a lot of love for this film though, and would probably pick it as my favourite of Imamura's 90s and 00's works. Tone and style-wise it always seemed to me more akin to Kitano's early 90s works than other Imamura's.

[Mr Sausage]

I'd forgotten Narayama'd won the palme d'or, too.

It's interesting how after progressively widening his cinema to take in what seems like the entirety of life in Eijanaika and Narayama he would refine his work down to the point that he could make small, gentle dramas like this and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge. Imamura, who'd always sought to place human actions within their wider social contexts, largely abandons those contexts in those latter two, making instead films about small found communities or the idea of idiosyncratic pair-bonding as community (when collectivist societies fail to incorporate offbeat members). Both movies are, I agree, not representative of Imamura's career (tho' very good films).

[Big Ben]

I don’t mean to be down on the movie—it is very good, and I’m happy Radiance are releasing it; but it’s not the movie I would want Imamura’s reputation tied to in the public eye.

What would you recommend for someone who has only seen Vengeance is Mine and The Ballad of Narayama and liked them both? I've been meaning to get into Imamura for a long, long time and have never done it because it was hard to get things like The Profound Desire of the Gods in good quality versions for myself at the time. I know you've recommended a text on Imamura too but I've forgotten that as well.

[Mr Sausage]

If you liked those two, Eijanaika is a great place to go next. Tho' in general, the three films in the Criterion box are must-sees and maybe the best bet overall. If you want to get a handle on Imamura's project, tho', his television documentaries are essential, especially Karayuki-san: the Making of a Prostitute (that one gives a clear account of the story that Imamura was trying to tell in miniature across so many of his films).

The book was Killers, Clients and Kindred Spirits: The Taboo Cinema of Shohei Imamura, a set of essays edited by David Desser and Lindsay Coleman. It's excellent, but better read after rather than before watching the films discussed.

[TechnicolorAcid]

I don’t mean to be down on the movie—it is very good, and I’m happy Radiance are releasing it; but it’s not the movie I would want Imamura’s reputation tied to in the public eye.

What would you recommend for someone who has only seen Vengeance is Mine and The Ballad of Narayama and liked them both? I've been meaning to get into Imamura for a long, long time and have never done it because it was hard to get things like The Profound Desire of the Gods in good quality versions for myself at the time. I know you've recommended a text on Imamura too but I've forgotten that as well.

I know the question wasn't for me, but I would happily recommend Black Rain (although it is my first Imamura) because it's a profoundly devasting look at the collective trauma and tolls that the Hiroshima bombing brought without too much melodrama or overt sentimentality.

[knives]

I'd forgotten Narayama'd won the palme d'or, too.

It's interesting how after progressively widening his cinema to take in what seems like the entirety of life in Eijanaika and Narayama he would refine his work down to the point that he could make small, gentle dramas like this and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge. Imamura, who'd always sought to place human actions within their wider social contexts, largely abandons those contexts in those latter two, making instead films about small found communities or the idea of idiosyncratic pair-bonding as community (when collectivist societies fail to incorporate offbeat members). Both movies are, I agree, not representative of Imamura's career (tho' very good films).

Only speaking for Warm Water and his 9/11 short, but I disagree with the take that there’s a fundamental change in subject. I’ll write more when I have time, but his anthropological interests are still there in a very strong way.

[Mr Sausage]

You're probably right and I'm just overstating things, but I'd love to hear your thoughts!

[Yakushima]

This always felt like lesser Imamura to me, so it’s weird to me that this was his big international breakthrough. Of his post-80s work, Dr. Akagi strikes me as maybe the most interesting and tonally diverse. The Eel is more straightforward, lacking the level of complexity Imamura so often brought to his material. There isn’t as much to plumb.

I don’t mean to be down on the movie—it is very good, and I’m happy Radiance are releasing it; but it’s not the movie I would want Imamura’s reputation tied to in the public eye.

Mr Sausage, I completely agree with you. For me, The Eel was an underwhelming experience. I wish they released Dr. Akagi instead - a much stronger work any way you look at it.

[knives]

You're probably right and I'm just overstating things, but I'd love to hear your thoughts!

This is all caveated with the fact that I’m still missing out on three of his features. I think any fair look at Imamura will see Profound Desire as his ur-text where he finally found the story, tone, and overall aesthetic that was his own. Leading up to it he was developing himself onto stories and after the stories were him growing films from his bossom. You can check nearly all these subsequent films by degree of removal. Narayama for example deals with the idea of Japan being ancient and ancient means being alien to yourself.

Warm Water is, I think, fairly close to this text if presented through means other than the ancient (looking over my notes I even called it Profound Desire with female ejaculate replacing paganism). The lead, for example, is fundamentally the same person: the weakened salaryman proper and properly useless by the modern world transformed by an encounter with the old. In this case the old is entirely interior in the form of joy through sexuality. Matters become a little separated on social scene due to the film being so interior. Like Narayama there’s this focus on village as microcosm so that people become entangled in this web of interaction.

I’d actually put Warm Water as a top three Imamura in part because he is able to hit such a high and precise set of notes all without underlining the magic which is something he had previously done.

[Mr Sausage]

That's fascinating, knives. You're reading Imamura's career very differently than I have. For a start, I've never quite known what to do with Profound Desires of the Gods. I bounce off of it in a way I don't with his others. So I've never thought of it as his ur-text (and given that Intentions of Murder is my favourite of his, it's hard not to resist your description of his pre-Profound Desires work).

I found my way into Imamura's themes through his 70s documentaries, which really lay out his vision of an alternate history of Japan, one where modernity was achieved through deliberate exploitation of various underclasses that, because exploitation did not suit the narrative Japan wanted to project on the world stage, was hidden and disavowed even as it formed the bedrock of Japanese social, political, economic, and military success. I tend to see that as his fundamental story played out in miniature across his films, with exploiters and exploited navigating social narratives and official stories while the pressures of survival bear down on them. That makes Japan a social space containing certain groups of people who are necessary and yet have no official standing. Tho', funnily, the fiction film where he tackles that theme most explicitly in terms of historical realities, Zegen, is one of his weakest.

Basically, modernity is revealed as a construction of social narratives, narratives that then drive social forces but which are often inadequate at constructing, or even explaining, actual social behaviour, creating alienation. So, again, it's fascinating that you're reading that alienation as coming out of Japan's ancientness (so not arising from contradictions in modernity as I saw it, but as a fundamental part of the experience of ancientness). Cool.

[zedz]

I think you're both right and that Imamura sees "the problem of Japan" in both post-war and pre-historic dimensions.* One of the aspects of his cinema that I love is that he's at the same time an extremely analytical director (diagnosing, exposing and explaining social issues) and an extremely passionate and emotionally immediate one. It gives his best films the tremendous energy of charging ahead on (at least) two levels at once. A Man Vanishes is a great example of this, where what sets out to be a topical documentary gets dissolved in the acid bath of messy emotions.

I fell in love with his core sixties features first, but all his eras and modes have their rewards. The Eel isn't at the top of my list, but that's because the top of that list is so very strong. It's nevertheless an excellent film, and better in the full-length director's cut. I'm assuming this is what Radiance is releasing?

* As Sausage notes, his key idea regarding modern Japanese history is that national success is founded on exploitation. The key pre-historic idea is that Japan itself was founded on incest (which forms the Id of a lot of his films). The Profound Desire of the Gods keeps both of those ideas pretty close to the surface, so I can see why it could be called an Ur-text.

[knives]

I was struggling over how best to parse his pre-Profound films and I will strongly agree that I didn’t do it justice (and will agree that Intentions is one of his best films). What I was attempting to get at is how Profound is a turning point which everything (including the docs) after it call back to. Maybe a better comparison is roots with it as a trunk and the subsequent as branches.

I like your readings a lot and I don’t think they are fully exclusive from my readings. Reality seems to become increasingly unreal for him and so the idea of modernity as a construct which deepens alienation is appealing to me. I think, for my reading, what the construct is masking is revealed by interactions with the ancient world which can be represented by religion, sexuality, and social expectation among other less common objects.

[swo17]

It's nevertheless an excellent film, and better in the full-length director's cut. I'm assuming this is what Radiance is releasing?

Yes, as confirmed on Discord

[Mr Sausage]

Yeah, I definitely never felt like we were disagreeing, but that you were widening out my perspective on Imamura, because I don’t think I’ve ever fully grasped his relation to pre-modern Japanese history (see: my difficulty getting my head around Profound Desires). I ought to go back and give him a chronological rewatch one of these days.

The key pre-historic idea is that Japan itself was founded on incest (which forms the Id of a lot of his films).

Could you expand on this a bit?

[knives]

My understanding is that there are a lot of other details that go into this, but in classic Japanese mythology Izanagi and Izanami who are the main deities for Japan created the islands through incest.

[beamish14]

My understanding is that there are a lot of other details that go into this, but in classic Japanese mythology Izanagi and Izanami who are the main deities for Japan created the islands through incest.

Per Shinto belief, weren’t the islands formed through the ejaculation of the deities?

[knives]

Yes, during love making between them. They are brother and sister.

[Michael Kerpan]

Glad to see all this Imamura talk. I remember shilling his work towards the start of my time on this forum.

I would agree that the longer version Eel definitely works better than the original release. If people have only seen that earlier version, I wonder if there valuation of the film will go up after seeing the extended version?

No BD of Eejanaika yet, right?

[ryannichols7]

I've been really excited to see this for a long time, and now being a huge fan of Koji Yakusho (right at a time many others feel the same way, with Cure being very en vogue and Perfect Days coming at the perfect time), I think this will be an easy home run for Radiance. I only wish Shochiku had seen it fit to give this a full on 4K restoration with the works, but I'm glad to be getting it nonetheless. I've held off watching it waiting for a better copy (like I did for Cure actually!) and I really hope it's worth the wait...

...but I am an Imamura agnostic. I think he can be equally brilliant and baffling and there's really no rhyme or reason seemingly to which Imamura I'm going to get. I'd love to join you guys' more in depth discussions but I haven't watched any of them in almost 2 years, quitting after our 60s project. I look forward to this one though! and of course, Tony Rayns talking about it

[senseabove]

What I'm getting from the lively discussion is... Imamura Auteur List Project?

[zedz]

I've been really excited to see this for a long time, and now being a huge fan of Koji Yakusho (right at a time many others feel the same way, with Cure being very en vogue and Perfect Days coming at the perfect time).

He's also terrific in last year's "disaster procedural" The Days (Netflix series partly directed by Hideo Nakata.)

[TMDaines]

It's nevertheless an excellent film, and better in the full-length director's cut. I'm assuming this is what Radiance is releasing?

Yes, as confirmed on Discord

Is there a Radiance films Discord?