Awe That's Eel

In The Eel, which won the Palme D'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, director Shohei Imamura once again demonstrates his empathy for the outsiders and aliens of Japanese society. In this case he muses on the tormented relationship between a paroled wife-murderer who's struggling with his past after eight years in jail, and an emotionally battered young woman who has just attempted suicide. It is a beautiful and profound piece of work by a wonderful filmmaker at the peak of his powers.

As in the few other Imamura films that have made their way across the Pacific to this country, what's most important in The Eel occurs just below its deceptively placid surface of lovely rural rivers and color-drenched fields of flowers -- the strain of guilt on a man who cannot bring himself to regret his crime of passion, and the deep-seated secrets of a woman whose romantic and familial missteps have compelled her to reinvent herself. The mild ex-convict Takuro Yamashita (Koji Yakusho) and the needy woman Keiko Hattori (Misa Shimizu), who bears an uncanny resemblance to the unfaithful wife he stabbed to death, develop a bond so fragile, yet so vital, that it puts mere movie romance to shame.

American audiences fell for actor Yakusho when he played the repressed suburbanite who frees his spirit through the fox trot in last year's Shall We Dance? He's even more impressive here in a role that could serve as an emotional companion piece: Takuro is so bent on detachment that he converses, for the most part, only with the pet eel he once kept in the prison pond and has now transferred to a barren aquarium that suggests the very state of his mind.

"He listens to what I say," Takuro says of the fish. "And he doesn't say what I don't want to hear." Still, Takuro cannot remain in his fortress forever.

While the late master Akira Kurosawa is revered by American film buffs, Imamura remains virtually unknown here, although he's been making movies since 1958. Of special note: his earlier Cannes grand prize winner, 1982's The Ballad of Narayama. For my money it is one of Japan's greatest films. In the story of a village where the elderly are left to die on a sacred mountaintop, Imamura explores the tension, as always he must, between the ingrown rituals and the contemporary disturbances of his homeland.

It is not without significance, then, that the troubled souls in The Eel -- so emblematic of Japan's current spiritual woes -- find refuge of a sort in two very different places -- the ancient temple where Takuro's kindly parole officer lives, and the worldly barbershop where Takuro intends to live out his days, alter people's appearances and protect his terrible secret. That last cannot happen, of course. Along with a fascinating cast of locals, including a farmer obsessed with UFOs and a fisherman who professes to understand the inner life of eels, old ghosts from Takuro and Keiko's pasts materialize to upset their equilibrium.

Dreaming that he's adrift in the eel's aquarium, Imamura's tortured hero recalls his wife: "I died along with her," he laments. And that might prove true if not for the intervention of a wise and merciful filmmaker who's long been in concert with the human comedy.

The Eel.
Written and directed by Shohei Imamura. With Koji Yakusho and Misa Shimizu.
Unrated.