Prince of porno

The debauchery and debasement of Shohei Imamura

by Peter Keough

"PIGS, PIMPS, AND PORNOGRAPHERS: THE FILMS OF SHOHEI IMAMURA," At the Museum of Fine Arts, January 23 through February 19.

Few filmmakers have had such a love affair with human debasement as the great Japanese director Shohei Imamura. In his prolific four-decade career, which is being showcased in an impressive 18-film retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, debauchery, prostitution, incest, infanticide, pornography, fetishism, murder, rape, voyeurism, poverty, greed, rapacious exploitation, and poor personal hygiene are simply the stuff of everyday life. Rarely does any perversity or abomination -- a troglodyte nicknamed Stinker, for example, having his way with an Akita in the lyrically squalid The Ballad of Narayama (1983; screens January 31 at 1:15 p.m.), one of his two films to win the Palme d'Or at Cannes -- raise an eyebrow. What does, rather, are Imamura's raucous formal beauty and his unexpected moments of transcendence -- sudden glimpses beneath the mortal garbage heap of redeeming decency, nobility, and love.

The focus in his examination of the seamy underside of seemingly squeaky-clean Japanese society is that basic social unit and cauldron of all joys and woes, the family. His first film, the more conventional Stolen Desire (1958; January 29 at 6:10 p.m.), plays like a Rabelaisian parody of Floating Weeds, by his mentor and artistic antithesis, Yasujiro Ozu. A family of kabuki troupers in Kyoto try to rouse the interest of their postwar Westernized audience by preceding their traditional fare with a strip show. Once the girls leave the stage, however, most of the audience leaves the theater, and the troupe's performance of a classic play disintegrates into internecine squabbling. The next day they are evicted, and the troubled, vacillating patriarch threatens to disband the group until the extended dysfunctional family of players rally around him. They set off for the sticks to revive their prospects at the expense of the culture- and T&A-hungry rubes.

The protagonist is a young theater student -- a stand-in for himself, Imamura has acknowledged in interviews -- who finds in the troupe a passion missing from his colleagues who have made good in the burgeoning TV industry. He's also taken a shine to the patriarch's daughter, who unfortunately is married to the preening star of the group; meanwhile his heartthrob's sister further complicates matters by developing the hots for him. The sibling rivalry/romantic triangle gets submerged beneath a foreground of vulgar farce, which includes the leering escapades of some of the older actors and the sybaritic pranks of the local variation on the gang in Porky's. Despite the hokum and the uncharacteristic sentimentality, Imamura's cinescope celebration of "messy" humanity remains distinctive, as does his creation of a realistic and formidable heroine.

That heroine returns fully formed -- or deformed -- in The Insect Woman (1963; January 23 at 7:45 p.m.), which studies with Buñuelesque entomological detachment and ribald sympathy four generations of striving, abused bastard women. A microcosmic history of 20th-century Japan, it begins with a close-up of a determined beetle toiling up an incline (the film is in some ways an inversion of Hiroshi Teshigahara's grim 1964 allegory of gender relations, Woman of the Dunes). The insect serves as a role model for Tome, the third in the illegitimate series. Raised by her whorish mother and her duped, incest-inclined nominal father in a primitive backwater village, she rises above her exploitation through persistence and coldbloodedness to become an exploiter herself.

Her own illegitimate daughter in tow, Tome heads for the city, where she becomes involved in an evangelical group that serves as a front for prostitution -- Imamura's views on religion, as on all other social institutions, is less than reverent. Employed in a brothel herself, she takes advantage of the madam's incarceration to usurp the operation, adding to her security by becoming the mistress of a wealthy businessman. Her hard-earned ruthlessness, however, is no match for her maternal instincts, and her sacrifices for her daughter end with a final betrayal -- and vindication.

The links among family, business, and prostitution are made overt in The Pornographers (1966; February 12 at 7:30 p.m.). Mr. Ogata, ostensibly a medical-supplies salesman, is in fact a maker and purveyor of pornographic films and photographs. Otherwise his life is sedately middle class, as he supports the widowed Haru, a barber with a chronic illness, and her spoiled teenage son and daughter. With the exception of Mr. Ogata's occasional peeping at her nubile adopted daughter, the ménage remains stable until Haru, despairing over her illness, kills herself. Mr. Ogata decides to abandon society and all relationships, devising a mechanical sex doll that he plans to take away with him forever on a houseboat.

Outlandish and pathological as The Pornographers and most of Imamura's other films are, they are recounted in a matter-of-fact, quasi-documentary style that both distances and implicates the viewer. His tendency to shoot sexual and other racy scenes through windows and other frames underscores the films' fundamental voyeurism, and his use of jolting stylistic effects such as freeze frames and odd point-of-view shots (in The Pornographers, most tellingly from the perspective of a large carp Haru believes to be the reincarnation of her late husband) injects his naturalism with an irrational, oneiric quality. He is in a sense a documentarian of society's id, and indeed most of his films are, if not non-fiction, at least based on true stories.

Such is the case with the brutal, ebullient Vengeance Is Mine (1979; February 6 at 7:45 p.m.), the story of the last days in the career of Iwao Enokizu, a serial killer played with charismatic nonchalance by Ken Ogata. Although framed in tabloid-documentary style with typed-in subtitles noting time and place, the narrative overflows that format, flashing back and forth in time and space and from the actual to the imaginary.

Beginning with a double murder of co-workers that, along with the central crime in Krzysztof Kieslowski's A Short Film About Killing, is among the most excruciating in cinema, Enokizu explodes into a short-lived crime spree of fraud, theft, and murder that culminates with the strangulation of the one person who sincerely loves him. Imamura flashes back to the sociopath's family life in an attempt to comprehend his behavior. He is is seen as a boy witnessing the humiliation of his father, a Catholic, at the hands of an Imperial officer during World War II. Despising his father's weakness, Enokizu grows up to be a petty criminal. Released from prison, he discovers that his father and his wife have become lovers (the seduction scene between father and wife is one of the more creepily erotic of Imamura's "incest" scenarios). None of this, however, explains the sheer zest and liberation of Enoziku's criminality. In the end, after he is hanged, his father and his wife try to hurl his bones off a cliff; in a masterpiece of perverse rebellion, they freeze in mid air.

Ogata returns in a much different role in Imamura's masterpiece, The Ballad of Narayama. Set in a barbaric recess of northern Japan a hundred years ago, it's an allegory of social repression and recalcitrant human nature. Ogata is the stoically resigned middle-aged patriarch of a family scrounging with others for survival in this benighted wilderness. Male babies are killed at birth and dumped in rice paddies as fertilizer; females are spared because they can be sold into prostitution for salt and other necessities. As for the aged, they are taken by the eldest son to Narayama, where supposedly they will meet with the mountain god but where they are, in fact, left for dead.

An obvious candidate for Narayama is Ogata's 70ish mother. Crotchety and in fine health, she is the true head of the family, a behind-the-scenes matriarch who ruthlessly orchestrates the murders and other abominations necessary for the clan's survival. When her time comes, however, her self-sacrificial determination prevails, and as brutish as the Narayama ritual is, it shimmers with a mythic beauty. Although studded with joyless copulations and cruelties (the Akita is just the beginning) intercut with images of natural cruelty and carnality, Narayama ends with an exchange of glances between mother and son that vindicates the human family in the midst of its most outrageous debasement.