User Reviews

Guilt and Redemption are the pervasive themes of this quirky, disturbing, very fine film from Shohei Imamura. The consequences of the instantaneous loss of control molds this story in the way such life happenstances unfold - slowly - and Imamura knows how to take us with him in this strange tale, pausing here and there for the surreal, dreamlike sequences that can and do alter our perceptions of reality.

Takuro Yamashita (Kôji Yakusho) is a quietly married blue-collar worker who spends some evenings fishing for sport and food, his passive wife Emiko (Chiho Terada) sending him off with boxed lunches. Takuro receives an anonymous letter that states his wife is having an affair while he slips away to fish. Incredulous, Takuro returns early form his nocturnal fishing to find his wife engaged in passionate sex and Takuro stabs her to death, then bicycles to the police station and turns himself in for the murder of Emiko. He is imprisoned for eight years and conforms to the rigid life of the incarcerated, his only companion is a pet eel with whom he feels he can communicate.

Upon release from prison, Takuro is placed under the supervision of a kindly priest who helps him start a barbershop, living a quiet secluded life, his only friends being his pet eel and a strange character who has set up a field station to attract friendly aliens from outer space! All is calm until he encounters Keiko (Misa Shimizu) who closely resembles his murdered wife and indeed is suicidal from her own slashes in an attempt to negate the genetic threat of her mentally disturbed mother and her own consignation with an underworld lover Eiji Dojima (Tomorowo Taguchi), a man who holds her under his control to gain the mad mother's money committed to his evil schemes. Takuro saves Keiko from her suicide attempt and the priest encourages him to take on Keiko as an assistant.

The barbershop does well and Takuro and Keiko make good business partners. Takuro is emotionally dead over his guilt for the murder of his wife and refuses to entertain the idea of opening himself to Keiko's loving advances. There are too many similarities between the dead Emiko and the frightened Keiko. Yet when all of the forces collide in the climax of the film, Takuro realizes how much of his past is mixed with fantasy/nightmare and, equally, how much his present is dependent on his interaction with Keiko (now pregnant with Dojima's baby), the priest, his sci-fi friend and the forces who would destroy Keiko and his quiet existence. The ending, somewhat marred by a keystone kops like fight, reveals the cracks in Takuro's mental armor and the possibility for redemption unfolds in a tender way.

There are many levels of interpretation to this fable and to explore each of them would rob the first-time viewer of this little film of the pleasure of the chess game Imamura sets for us. The acting is solid, the night scenes are lovely, and the day scenes are as visually chaotic as the real world in which we live. There could be improvements in the editing, definitely in the musical score and in the camera work. But those are minor blemishes in this film that engages the mind in the challenge of entering a new mode of thought. A strange little film, this, and not for everyone. Grady Harp.

This complex and beautiful film is built on correspondences and contrasts; between landscape and society, man and nature, between passive and active, death and life, sanity and madness, the repressed and the unbridled, sexuality and abstinence, comedy and tragedy, alienation and redemption. The many strands to these themes are woven together in a complex pattern that defies complete analysis. Yet 'The Eel' is well-paced and is easy to watch and enjoy.

The film is set in Japan, that most self-disciplined and compliant of countries, and it is the limits, and limitations, of conformity and control that are explored. Behaviour is checked, emotions kept inward; yet when people look inward they find a seething that terrifies.

The landscape here is a damp, featureless, washed-out coastland, exquisitely shot in a subdued palette that embodies the film's subject. The people, too, are generally quiet, gentle, good citizens. Yet violence and disturbance erupt into their lives as norms are broken: a woman makes love, intensely, exultantly, adulterously. Her husband discovers her and stabs her to death in the very act. After eight years in prison Yamashita is released on parole, alienated and withdrawn, and, accompanied by his eel companion, opens a barber's shop. He finds Keiko, unconscious after a suicide attempt, and she begins to work for him. She, too, is on conditional release, from her crazy mother and unpleasant extortionist boyfriend. There is an immediate sympathy between Yamashita and Keiko, a sympathy that he, especially, cannot bring himself to express, driven to repression and passivity by his guilt and fear.

Each of these principal characters correspond with other characters in the film, providing a network of symmetry and contrast. Thus, Yamashita's failure to express his yearning for Keiko is set against Dojima's earlier lovemaking with her, and a fellow ex-convict's attempted rape. The ex-con haunts Yamashita, taunting him with his weaknesses, until he is transformed into a phantasm of Yamashita's imagination. Yamashita's wife's affair, too, finds resonance in Keiko's sensuality - and in both women's determination to provide a lunch box whenever Yamashita goes fishing. At the end, the man volunteers to assume paternity of Keiko's unborn child by Dojima.

Attempts by minor characters in the film to reach out beyond febrile compliance and quietism provide humour but little comfort: Keiko's mother's Spanish dancing is but a manifestation of her madness, and Yamashita's friend seeks only the unattainable and absurd, in his obsession with contacting UFOs. The moments of irony and humour are generally introduced with a light touch, but the transition is less satisfactory in the climactic fight at the barber's shop. This crucial moment in the film, when Yamashita fights Dojima and his thugs, against her past and his, is filmed as slapstick; the humour in unnerving.

In the end there is redemption, but the contrast of the conventional with the unruly is resolved, once more, quietly, almost submissively. Yamashita, his parole broken, returns to gaol for a year; Keiko waits for the birth of her child and Yamashita's release. Harmony is restored - on the surface. The eel, at last, is released.

'The Eel' is a subtle and complex film, with a succession of images that require more than one viewing and more than this brief note to tease out. But doing so will be a rewarding experience. Imamura's film is strong and subtle, warm yet critical. It will reward many viewings.

Shohei Imamura had already won the Golden Palm for his remake of "The Ballad of Nayarama" when he won again for "The Eel" a decade later. I wish I could regard it as a little more than your 'routine' foreign prize-grabbing movie but after such emotional knock-outs as "Underground" and "Secrets & Lies", I was perplexed. I thought it didn't do justice to a story that had a much greater potential.

"The Eel" has a poetry of its own, a melancholic quest for an unreachable purity from a man named Takuro Yamashita (Koji Yakusho) who served eight years in jail after killing his wife because she cheated on him. Receiving mail letters denouncing her, he pretended to go fishing to surprise her that same night with her lover. Takuro is startled, the scene is graphic and it's not out of voyeurism. It is possible that Takuro saw a facet of his wife he didn't suspect, one that reflected his own incapability to make his woman satisfied, if not happy.

And so he takes the most phallic deadly object and what follows is a disturbing and gory knifing scene that literally paints the screen in blood in ways even Kurosawa didn't dare. Takuro stabs the lover once but on his wife, he does it so much I believe in the impotency theory. Not only it's mentioned later in the movie but there's a sense of relief after the murder: Takuro covers his wife's body, takes his bike and gives himself to the police. Eight years later, he's released. There's a weird feeling of convenient expediency all through his actions, as if Karma sided with Takuro.

Indeed, the question of guilt is never really raised, which validates the idea that Takuro felt like he was delivering justice and that he paid what he owed. It's all natural then that he tries to work again as a barber and gives a new meaning to his life. He meets new people, gets his regular clients and befriends a fisherman with which he enjoys hunting eel together. Speaking of that, there's that pet eel he took from jail, the only creature he can talk to and share his secret with... to be honest, the eel left me cold, I appreciate some natural symbolism every once in a while but I couldn't picture the eel as nothing more than a sort of touchstone he needed in order to raise above, it was his Wilson the volleyball, so to speak.

Gradually, and thankfully, the eel loses his importance as we witness Takuro's icy façade melting. All's quiet then until he meets the young and beautiful Keiko Hatori (Misa Shimizu) who looks like his wife and whom he accidentally saves from an attempt of suicide and as a way to show her everlasting certitude, she works for him and naturally, falls in love with him, and no matter how hard he tries to dodge her courtship and the boxed lunches she brings him every morning when he goes back to work, work ends up bringing them together. It is rather strange how everything goes fine for Takuro, he was a decent man first and became a decent man again after, the film has an almost cynical way to tell you that every decent man has the right to "loosen up" and transcend ethical limitations.

Fair enough, the director can encourage us to side for Takuro, but sometims, he asks too much from our compassion and the least he could do is make the character problematic for the others, if not for us. Keiko is an interesting character but there never seems to be any problem with her with Takuro's past, the guy's got quite a puzzling aura for a woman used to deal with creepy individuals. And while the harassing garbage-man reproaches him (and rightfully so) his lack of guilt and redemption, the man is depicted in such a despicable way that we can only side with Takuro by default. Then there's a whole subplot about pregnancy, money, loan sharks and a lunatic mother that feel contrived and prefabricated for a film that aims for contemplation. Now, to make a long story shot, it didn't take me much time to figure out the film's problem, it's not about feeling sympathy for Takuro.

I was mentioning "Secrets & Lies", the previous Golden Palm winner, what made the film so impactful is the final revelation and the ensuing emotionality. "The Eel" handles Takuro's past as a secret but one that we know with every detail, we're like one step ahead of everyone and we don't see Takuro as a mystery, we see him as a man trying to get back to normality and knowing his past ceases to be a point. Then why would Imamura make such a big fuss about that murder if it doesn't have any specific resonance after? I believe the murder should have been the revelation, Imamura should have kept an aura of mystery over Takuro and at some point make him reveal to Keiko that he murdered his wife, only words, and leave the bloody sequence as a climactic flashback.

I don't want to depreciate the film for technicality but its most powerful moment should have been kept for the ending. Let us interrogate ourselves about that man, let us wonder if he's worth our sympathy and then let's just surprise us. A film so quiet and contemplative needed a more satisfying climax than that lousy fight, a moment that seemed to belong to another movie.

There' no denial that "The Eel" ("Unagi" as would say Ross) doesn't need to aim for high-standards of movie-making to be an overall solid and punctually powerful drama but a misplaced climax derailed the character's arc and emotional flow and turned the whole film into something poetic and beautiful, but rather lackluster experience given the thrills it provided in the opening scene. Indeed, it should have ended with the beginning.

The Invisible Eel (1997) by Shohei Imamura.

Short synopsis:

Japan, 1988. A married man, named Yamashita, comes home where his wife awaits him, with whom he seems to have an excellent relationship. So he goes out alone to fish, reading during the journey what seems to be a poem, with a melancholic air. Unexpectedly returned from fishing with his friends, Yamashita arrives home and, with enormous surprise, caughts his wife betraying him with a lover. After a transition from amazement to rage, the husband takes a cutlass and enters the room, stabbing the lover first and his wife after, repeatedly. After completing the gesture, totally calm and relaxed, he still walks dirty of blood at a police station, self-denounding himself and handing over the murder weapon. After 8 years, he gets released on parole and brings home an eel. End spoilers.

Comment:

A movie that investigates the psychology of a man living the trauma of an assassination, with a strong drama, thanks also to an extraordinary directing as suspended, reminiscent of the style of Kitano and characterized by a few close-ups, if not with regard to the main character Yamashita. In fact, he has to deal with social reintegration and all that he entails, something that with ups and downs he lands morally. So it is an eel his only refuge from his past, sometimes even from his present, and with the animal he develops a particular bond. The film has an extreme technical and stylistic level: there is not an element that is not minutely studied, from the narrative structure, to the engaging environments, to the interpretations of each actor, up to the magnificent photograph. In particular the latter is creepy, especially in the exterior (where most of the film is filmed), thanks to the light games that use the natural irradiation of the day and the artificial one during night shootings. Palme d'Or (Imamura is one of the 8 directors to have won 2 times this prestigious prize), definitely a must for every cinephile that defines itself by this word, but the movie has low availability. An unmissable revisitation of the themes characterizing the works of Dostoevskij, in particular to the crime and punishment with which the film shares some elements, especially concerning the psychology of the assassin in which a parallelism is created between russian Raskol'nikow and japanese Yamashita.

This movie really was a rollercoaster. It starts in an office. Our main character is a regular grown man with a job. After a few minutes we find out that he has a wife. Also his big passion is fishing. When he goes home, he gets a letter that gives him hints that his wife is cheating on him. He tries to find out if thats true and it is. He murders his wife and ends up in jail. The movie cuts, and we end up 8 years later. The man leaves jail with a bag that contains an eel. This scene alone brought me to tears. It was truly beautiful. The rest of the movie shows the new life of the man. He meets a new woman but rejects her all the time.

The thing i liked most about this movie is the action. To the average human there is 0 Action in this movie, but to me it was so full of it. There's not one second without pure action and hype.

Everyone that hasnt watched this is truly missing out on a lifetime experience. I wpuld sell my soul if that meant that i could watch this movie for the first time again.

I was slightly disappointed with this Cannes winner, which has many good elements, but not a thoroughly convincing total. A rather unexciting public official, Yamashita, receives anonymous letters about his wife's adultery. Finding her in the act one night he stabs her to death. 8 years later he is trying to begin a new life, with his prison pal, an eel, as company. He opens a barber shop on a desolate river shore and tries to mind his own business, interacting only reluctantly with the locals. A woman he saves from suicide, Keiko, enters his life and tries to break down his barricades. There are many funny and touching scenes, as when Keiko tries stubbornly to provide Yamashita with a lunch bag against his will, and the many nightly fishing trips, where our hero releases the fish as soon as they are caught, are also unforgettable. The movie gains intensity because of the challenge Keiko presents to Yamashita's crumbled self, and some of his scenes of self-questioning are rewarding, but in the end I think movie is too sloppy and inconsequent. The farcical climax falls flat - what I like best are the calm scenes around the barber shop and by the river where the story comes to a halt. 8/10 ************SPOILER!!!!**************** At some point Yamashita realises with a shock that perhaps there was no letter about his wife's adultery. He imagined it. Which makes me wonder: did he imagine the adultery as well, and killed his wife only because of his frustrations with himself? His wife's sensuality, as well as Keiko's, is deeply contrasted with Yamashita's lack of warmth and inability to connect. His tormentor claims that he was unable to fulfill his marital obligations. If that is true, it could have driven him insane. And we never hear about the trial, the other man etc.