The Eel

But if there's no more Ealing, there is The Eel, the latest from Japan's distinguished and venerable director Shohei Imamura-perhaps the finest now that Kurosawa is gone. Based on a novel by Akira Yoshimura, the film tells of Takuro Yamashita, a lowly white-collar worker who, goaded by an anonymous letter, catches his wife in flagrante delicto. He kills her, gives himself up, and spends eight years in jail, where he learns the barber's trade and acquires a pet eel to have soulful, albeit somewhat one-sided, conversations with. Paroled in the care of a kindly Buddhist priest and his motherly wife, Takuro restores a dilapidated barbershop in a small seaside town and starts a new life.

He has glimpsed a young woman who strongly resembles his dead wife, and one day he stumbles across her in the bushes, close to death from an overdose of pills. He rescues her and grudgingly accepts her as a shop assistant. This Keiko proves invaluable: not only does she turn the shop into a thriving concern, she is also deeply concerned for Takuro's creature comforts. She lodges with the priest and his wife rather than return to Tokyo, where a crazy mother and brutal ex-lover cause her miseries that, however, will not fail to catch up with her. Takuro, in turn, is harassed by a fellow ex-convict who is now a garbage man, a drunken bully and hypocrite, who insists that Takuro wallow in remorse. Since the dignified but withdrawn barber refuses, the lout reveals his past to Keiko. But she, by now, is in love with her boss, however much he may have abjured women.

Takuro's best friends are a man with whom he goes eel-fishing at night, and who instructs him in eel lore, and a young fellow who is tirelessly preparing an ideal site for a UFO to land on, and for this purpose keeps borrowing Takuro's barber pole. The film is full of such idiosyncratic characters, quaint not because they are Japanese but because they are human. Even the eel has its human characteristics, being, as in Eugenio Montale's famous poem, "the torch, whiplash, arrow of love on earth."

A bizarre, anguiliform film, The Eel displays the twists and turns of its titular character-and all the others, caught in the throes of love and hate, fear and frustration, as they wriggle their way through the currents of life. There are developments that are touching or burlesque, exquisite or ferocious, but all unpredictable, always. Keiko does not readily find the path to Takuro's frozen heart, and many ludicrous or harrowing mishaps block the man's passage from imprisoning reclusiveness to the light of recognition. Thus when Keiko prepares meals for him on his fishing expeditions, he callously rejects them: they remind him of the ones his wife packed for him on similar occasions while she, profiting from his angling absences, disported herself with her lover.

The stages by which Takuro realizes that he cannot run from his feelings and is drawn to Keiko, and the explosive events that crack his carapace, are evoked with a delicately quizzical charm or raucous hilarity edged with menace. It is an iridescent world of beauty turning to terror, of rage yielding to appeasement. Thus even the horror of watching one's beloved spouse making unleashed love to another is captured with the fascination of something beautiful, and the subsequent crime passionnel features a frenzy that partakes of the amorous.

The acting is flawless. Koji Yakusho, so splendid in the great Shall We Dance?, is equally fine as Takuro. He is as moving in comic bewilderment as in arduous self-control, as touching when he opens up to his eel as when he shuts himself off from Keiko. His is a slow thawing into humanity from the robotic prison existence, and Yakusho endows every stage of the transition with exemplary restraint, yet also intimations of harbored warmth.

No less remarkable is the Keiko of Misa Shimizu, who, starting out from even greater negativity than Takuro's, learns faster the redemptive power of giving. Without a trace of sentimentality, the actress daintily conveys the arc from defensiveness to commitment, while resolutely contending with the demonism of her ex-lover and the dementia of her mom. It is, like Yakusho's, acting so self-effacing that it ceases to be anything but living. And the supporting roles are worthily taken under Imamura's direction, so finely balanced between comedy and drama that neither is ever wholly lost from sight. What we get is always a little more intense than mere naturalism (Imamura collaborated on the script), but when it deviates from the literal, it is only to espouse the poetic.

COPYRIGHT 1998 National Review, Inc.
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