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"Really frightful, isn't it?" "What?" "Human nature." The smut peddler (Shoichi Ozawa) is a middle-aged Osakan first seen leading cast and crew into the woods for the day's shoot, in his mind a helper of the deprived and lonesome, "social welfare, in other words." His 8mm loops flicker in smoky screening rooms, rather innocent compared to the world's tangle of suppressed desire. His widowed mistress (Sumiko Sakamoto) runs a barbershop, massages her teenage son's (Masaomi Kondo) belly under the covers, believes her husband's soul lives in the carp watching from its tank, cf. Tsai's What Time Is It There? Her daughter (Keiko Sagawa) is a sullen schoolgirl constantly spied on, a shot of the protagonist sniffing her discarded undies segues into a memory of her knee dented by a car crash on the way to class. A lacerating comedy, "an introduction to anthropology," a philosophical manifesto from Shohei Imamura. All-pervasive voyeurism within complicated arrangements, multiple planes of depth broken up by doorways and slats and fishbowls. (A striking split-screen effect is achieved with bosses and workers separated by a wall and glimpsed through a rectangular window.) Virgins are a prized commodity in the pimping trade ("I'm tired of secondhand girls," grouses a rancid-faced moneybags), clandestine productions include a dim leading lady fueled by lollipops. Overhead angles and freeze-frames, the mad spasms that can't vanish life's cage. The impotent cinéaste tours a darkened orgy with candelabra in hand, "the way to freedom," not quite. "My business may be immoral, but I treat everybody honestly." The punchline is the search for the ideal woman as a mechanical doll on a drifting houseboat, bewildering to the audience at the close but perfectly understood by Fellini (Casanova). With Haruo Tanaka, Nakamura Ganjiro II, Ko Nishimura, and Ichiro Sugai. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |