Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.
Shohei Imamura’s Palme d’Or-winning film The Eel from 1997 is an engaging piece of work from an accomplished master director. It’s a bit of a potpourri genre-wise, but that merely adds to viewer intrigue in this instance. This film provides strong evidence that Japanese cinema still breathes, even if it is less robust than it once was.
Historical Background: The Japanese film industry took more of a hit from the advent of television than did its American counterpart. When director Shohei Imamura, born in 1926, began making films in the late 1950’s, the annual audiences in movie theaters in Japan totaled around one billion people per year. By 1980, shortly before Inamura produced his internationally acclaimed The Ballad of Narayama, the film audiences in Japan had dipped to about 150 million per year or about one-seventh of what it was in the heyday of Japanese cinema. Many of the Japanese films best known to international audiences were produced between 1950 and 1962, partly because funding sources dried up when the audience began to disappear. The award-winning film The Eel, made by Imamura in 1997, came a full eight year after his last feature film Black Rain (1989), which was among Imamura’s best works. If even a director as venerable as Imamura (twenty films over a forty year career after mastering his craft under the tutelage of the great Yasujiro Ozu) coming off a success is unable to find funding for eight years, clearly the Japanese film industry is struggling. Struggling but not moribund.
International audiences, including Americans, will occasionally embrace a foreign film, even with subtitles, but usually only if a prominent feature of the film is the portrayal of exotic elements of foreign culture, such as Samurai. Americans, for example, are far less inclined to watch a film like The Eel about basic human relationships, no matter how well done, in other than their native language. Film festivals and art house audiences are more ecumenical, however. When Imamura entered The Eel at the Cannes film festival in 1997, he returned home early after observing that the competition included many high-budget entries, feeling that his film had little chance. When The Eel later shared the coveted Palme d’Or (with the Iranian film Taste of Cherry), the award had to be accepted on Imamura’s behalf by the film’s star, Koji Yakusho. Imamura later joked from Japan that the ballots must have been mis-tallied. Such is the pessimism in the Japanese film industry today! Imamura became one of just three directors to ever win the Palme d’Or twice, having previously won it in 1983 for The Ballad of Narayama.
Imamura was part of the third generation of Japanese directors, born in the late 1920’s, who set out to change the style of Japanese film by introducing darker and more nihilistic elements. Imamura felt a need to break from the highly formalistic style of his mentor, Ozu (Tokyo Story (1953), Floating Weeds (1959), Late Autumn (1960)). Imamura’s films frequently feature perverse and violent sex, murderers, prostitutes, sexually aggressive women, and pornographers. Imamura was once quoted as saying, “I am interested in the lower part of the human body and the lower part of the social structure.” Like a similarly salacious counterpart from Spain, Pedro Almodóvar, Imamura learned over time to channel his instincts for the shadowy elements of human sexuality into subject matter also possessing deeper thematic appeal. Imamura found the perfect opportunity to do so with an interesting novel entitled Glimmering in the Dark by Akira Yoshimura, which became the basis for the script of The Eel.
The Story: The story begins with a powerful pre-credit opening scene. It is the summer of 1988 and Takuro Yamashita (Koji Yahusho) is “joe average” of Japan, holding down a white-collar job for a flour company. On the train ride home, Takuro reads an anonymous letter (not the first that he’s received) that informs him that his wife, Emiko (Chiho Terada), is cheating on him with another man. The letter provides specific details that are hard to dismiss. Their trysts take place when Takuro goes fishing overnight, as he sometimes does, and his wife’s lover drives a white sedan.
Takuro keeps the information to himself, leaves as usual for his fishing trip, but returns home almost immediately. Sure enough, he spots a white sedan parked outside his home. Sneaking quietly up to the bedroom window, Takuro first hears sounds of lovers in the throes of passion and then visually confirms that his wife is in the midst of steamy sex. Takuro collects a large knife from the nearby shed and surprises the lovers, stabbing the man in the back. After only a moment’s hesitation, he stabs his stunned wife repeatedly, splattering blood in every direction. It’s a gruesome opening scene. As the film credits now run, Takuro Yamashita rides his bicycle down to the police station, still wearing his blood soaked fishing jacket, and turns himself in, along with the murder weapon.
The story now picks up eight years later. Takuro is being released from prison after eight years but must still serve a two-year parole period under the oversight of a Buddhist priest, Jiro Nakajima (Fujio Tsuneta). Takuro has become something of a strange young man between his guilt and the regimentation of prison. He emerges from prison carrying a pet eel that the guards had allowed him to keep in the prison fountain. He explains his fondness for the eel to the priest as follows: “He listens to what I say. He doesn’t say what I don’t want to hear.” It has been decided that Takuro will reopen an old, long-closed barbershop in a rural village. He has money from an inheritance and his prison pension to refurbish it and was trained as a barber while in prison. While he and the priest are walking through the village in the direction of the old shop, a team of runners passes by and Takuro, in a bit of slapstick, joins the group momentarily out of habit from his eight years in prison.
Takuro resists making friends in his new community, preferring the company of his eel, which is soon housed in a tank in the barbershop. The shop repairs proceed quickly and Takuro spends the rest of his time fishing nearby, waiting for customers. While collecting food for his eel one day, from a remote inlet, Takuro accidentally encounters the body of a woman. Recalling that he is to avoid trouble while on probation at all cost, he initially hurries home on his bicycle, but later gathers some townspeople and returns to the spot. It’s a good thing he did because it turns out that the woman, Keiki (Misa Shimizu), was unconscious from a suicide attempt with barbiturates, but not dead. His choice to take the proper action had saved her life.
When Keiki has recovered, the priest asks Takuro to take her on as an assistant in the barbershop, presumably hoping that these two lost souls can help one another find peace and redemption. Takuro is understandably fearful of his own impulses and emotions and can barely look at the lovely Keiki, all the more so because she resembles the wife that he had murdered. Keiki, however, turns out to be the salvation of Takuro’s barbershop business. She cleans the place up, adds flowers and generally makes the place far more inviting. She had worked for a barber earlier in her life and knows how to give shampoos. Soon the shop is hopping with business and has become something of a hangout for the locals. Still, Takuro keeps his relationship with Keiki strictly Platonic, despite her warm domestic attentions to him.
In addition to these lead characters, the town is populated by an assortment of oddball types (in much the manner of films like Amélie and Antonia’s Line). One young man, Masaki (Ken Kobayashi), Takuro’s nearest neighbor, is a UFO-fanatic. He is determined to build a beacon, of sorts, to attract aliens. He borrows Takuro’s barber’s pole when he’s closed as a centerpiece for his rather elaborate and surreal contraption.
Another rather philosophical man of the village shares fishing tips with Takuro and explains the breeding practices of eels. The Japanese had long thought that there were no female eels – only males. The females, however, live in warm waters near the equator. The males migrate there once a year to fertilize the eggs of the females. Later, they escort the offspring back to Japanese waters, many perishing along the way. The male eels thereby care for the offspring without regard to hereditary linkages, since the father of any particular baby eel is indeterminate.
Another local who becomes important to the story is a garbage collector, Tamotsu Takasaki (Akira Emoto). He is also an ex-con and knows Takuro from their days in prison together. He is envious of, first, Takuro’s success with his barbershop and, second, the presence of Takuro’s lovely assistant, Keiki. He’ll ultimately expose Takuro’s status to the villagers. He also tries to rape Keiki, at one point, while drunk on Saki.
Keiki has her own problematic history as well. Takuro discovers that her suicide attempt was related to involvement with a man, Eiji Dojima (Tomorowo Taguchi), who is a bad apple and primarily interested in conning Keiki’s mentally unstable mother, Fumie Hattori (Etsuko Ichihara), out of her bank account. The mother is quite a character, fancying herself “The Carmen of Akita,” always ready to strike up a flamenco routine at the sound of a guitar. There’s a flashback scene that is simultaneously hot and humorous where Dojima is doing Keiki with a vibrator (under the covers) while the pair talk finances and what to do with the mother – in between Keiki's orgasmic moans.
I’m not going to outline the further developments of the plot of this film because one of the film’s great strengths is that it succeeds in keeping you guessing about which direction the story will travel. Up to the point described so far, it’s already been thriller/mystery, comedy, gangster film, and touching romance, and there’s little way to know which of these it will be in the end. This film’s plot is as slippery as an eel while wiggling its way to an unforeseeable conclusion.
Themes: Imamura is a director who despises humanity but loves individual humans. In fact, the more outrageous the individuals, the more Imamura showers them with the loving eye of his camera. Imamura seeks to expose the perverseness of human passions and social structures, such as those that led to Hiroshima or that lead daily to violent crimes on a smaller scale, but he holds out hope in the rehabilitation of individual sinners. Here he presents us with two troubled individuals – damaged goods of a type – and offers viewers a vision of their redemption through love. This film reminds me thematically of another fine film featuring scarred individuals discovering love together, A Man and a Woman.
Another interesting theme in this film is the nature of successful penitence. Redemption cannot be realized by merely going through the trappings of contrition. The garbage man ex-con prays, writes verse, burns candles, sits by his altar, visits his victim’s grave – and then complains when none of this results in a better life for himself. Yamashita, by contrast, resists the pretense of guilt that he does not genuinely feel, but rebuilds his humanity from the inside out, by personal growth.
Production Values: Except for the opening segment, the pace of the film is rather leisurely. Imamura is intent on giving his characters an opportunity to be seen by the audience in ordinary daily life so that they acquire some depth and color. As is typical of Japanese cinema, there is less emphasis on facial close-ups than we see in the majority of Hollywood films. Japanese cinema is less interested in promoting a strong emotional identification with characters on the part of the audience and more interested in a reflective, objective, observational stance.
There are several interesting surrealistic touches scattered throughout the film. Near the beginning, as Takuro becomes enraged, one of the street lights turns red. Later, there’s an excellent sequence involving Takuro and the eel’s tank where he perceives himself diving into the tank, chasing after the voice of the letter that exposed his wife’s infidelity. Then, there’s a lovely shot when Takuro is trying to net food for his eel, just before discovering Keiki unconscious.
Imamura’s use of symbolism is uncommonly effective. He doesn’t resort to a plethora of sickeningly obvious symbols, instead concentrating on a few and developing them to a richness of expression. For example, the last positive exchange between Takuro and his wife before he leaves on his fishing trip is her giving him a lunch basket – a symbol of caring love. When it transpires that she is unfaithful, the lunch basket becomes symbolic of false love. Later, Keiki tries to give Takuro a lunch basket from the bridge that Takuro and his fishing partner pass under. He refuses to take it and orders his friend not to stop the boat. The next time, she lowers it on a string as the boat passes, and he still refuses it. The lunch basket symbol later returns one final time near the film’s finale.
The eel symbol may seem rather obvious, but again Imamura develops it to an extent that it really has multiple meanings and potential interpretations. On one level, the eel represents Takuro’s withdrawal from human associations by his preference for the eel. He feels that he’s not fit for human interaction because his emotional response to his wife’s infidelity was so out-of-control. The eel thus also represents his guilty conscience. He suggests as much when he points out that the eel “doesn’t say what I don’t want to hear.” The eel can also be seen as symbolic of that slippery wet snake that is human emotions. They’re fine when they’re neatly bottled up in a container but can slither out of control when they’re on the loose. At still another level, the eel is also an obvious symbol of the male sex organ and related passions. In short, the eel, in this film, is no shallow, one-dimensional symbol tossed into the mix simply to demonstrate command of symbolism as is too often the case in some other films.
Koji Yakusho gave a very nice performance as the mainly taciturn Takuro. He’s an experienced actor with credits in such films as Tamporo (1986), Shall We Dance? (1996), Cure (1997), and Eureka (2000). Misa Shimizu, the female lead, was both lovely and emotionally expressive. The various character actors were excellent as well, notably Akira Emoto as the garbage man and Etsuko Ichihara as Keiki’s mother. The latter had previously worked for Imamura in Black Rain (1987).
Some viewers and critics complain about unresolved questions in this film. One example is the identity of the person who wrote the letter exposing Emiko’s infidelity. Then there’s some question as to whether the lover died as well since mention thereafter is made only to the murder of his wife – never “and her lover.” There are questions raised but not answered as to whether the letter ever even existed – though it seems implausible that it didn’t. Imamura, however, has an express aversion to neatness in his films precisely because he worked for so many years with the obsessively meticulous Yasujiro Ozu.
Bottom-Line: So, what we’ve got here is a delightful film that keeps you engrossed because you can’t anticipate where it’s going and because the characters are interesting and sympathetic. The theme of redemption of nearly-lost souls is also one of my favorites. There is little that is essentially Japanese about this film – it could have been made by Hollywood with American actors with relatively little change in the script. Maybe it will be, but if history is any guide, the remake would not be nearly as satisfying anyway. Forget your aversion to subtitles and get out there and give this film a peek. This is the most recent Japanese film that I personally have seen thus far and it gives me some encouragement about the future of the Japanese film industry. The Eel is in Japanese with English subtitles and has a running time of 117 minutes. My DVD copy from New Yorker Video includes the theatrical trailer, scene selection, and profiles and filmographies for the cast and director.
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