I will write maggots until I die. - Shohei Imamura
For many Chinese audiences, many Japanese movies are a bit "perverted", telling strange stories, bloody, violent, and curious.
Masahira Imamura is one such director who focuses on "perverted" films.
Take the example of the "Raoshan Festival Examination", the widow's wife is as good as her husband, the female dog is invaded, the family is buried alive to steal the family, the paddy field abandons the baby, the cliff pushes the father, and the mountain sends the mother.
Picking out a plot from it can become the content of major news headlines.
Are you disgusted? Are you scared? Are you unwell?
Would you cover your eyes and lean on your boyfriend and say, I don't want to look at this?
Many people like exquisite, beautiful, small and fortunate things, and abandon all rough, ugly, and tragic truths.
But life will not accommodate you because you don't like it, avoid you alone, and let you live in a vacuum. To reject reality is to reject life.
Masahira Imamura's films, writing about maggots, writing about darkness, writing about ugliness, are all part of life.
Missing Shohei Imamura's film, you'll miss an opportunity to explore your own original desires and humanity.
Having said all that, what story does "The Eel" tell?
Yamashita is an ordinary employee of a certain company, and his wife Mieko is virtuous and beautiful, delicate and decent. Just like other middle-class housewives in Japan.
Yamashita and Mieko's marriage is not shocking on the surface, and life is moving forward slowly, but what does excessive politeness represent? I don't know you well enough.
Are there couples who don't quarrel and have good feelings? Yes, very little. They are either very accommodating and restrained, or they don't care at all.
Yamashita receives a letter from a neighbor who tells her that Mieko often meets with people in the middle of the night.
So after work, Yamashita told his wife that he was going to go fishing, and he would not go home at night, and when he arrived at the fishing spot, he killed another back carbine.
Sure enough, he bumped into his wife who was having an affair with someone, and he left the window down the hill, went around to the back of the house, and opened the door, during which his wife's crying for bed suddenly and small with the distance.
He even watched with interest how his wife was in bed with other men, as if the people in the bed had nothing to do with him.
This detail of Imamura Shohei makes people beat the knot.
Under what circumstances do we bump into the other half cheating on someone, not immediately bloody, but peeping for a while?
The physiological first reaction cannot be pretended. If the relationship with the other half is very good, bumping into it, the blood will immediately gush upwards; and if the feelings of the two have been flat as chicken ribs, the first reaction will be calm.
After Yamashita killed his wife, he did not change his blood clothes, took the tools of the crime, and rode a bicycle to the police station to turn himself in.
The background music here is brisk, and he even hums a little tune.
Some people interpret it as "pathological", and I think it is "liberation".
In a marriage with a backwater, in which the parties are involved, it is impossible not to be aware of it. After noticing this, the two continue to whitewash the peace, showing their weakness and cowardice - no one is willing to break the window paper and face the real relationship and the real self. So this marriage became a cage.
Yamashita did not receive the letter from the neighbor at all, which was his imagination. It was his excuse to want to settle the marriage, and it was also to excuse himself after killing his wife in order not to be condemned by conscience.
He killed his wife not because of love (as mentioned above, there was no longer love between him and her), but because of the desire for control.
Although marriage is like a backwater, it is a contract after all. I didn't cheat, give you a monthly home, play the role of husband, how can you cheat? There is no spirit of contract.
It was out of this thought that Yamashita wanted to kill his wife.
But his upbringing, his conscience, pulled him back: killing is wrong, selfish, bad.
In the end, animal instinct triumphed over reason.
But at the same time, he was completely desperate about human nature, not knowing who to believe and who else to believe.
Therefore, in prison, he only talked to eels, and when he was released, he also took it with him, refusing to be approached by women.
He went to the remote countryside and opened a barber shop, ready to die in the dull. No ambition, no ideals, no emotions, just living.
But he met Katsurako.
Keiko chose to commit suicide by taking medicine because she could not stand her boyfriend of inferior character and her mentally ill mother. This act of death instinct is also animalistic.
Two animal-free people coming together is the best outcome.
Katsurako's boyfriend came looking for trouble again and again. At first, Yamashita made up his mind not to accept Katsurako's admiration or help Katsurako.
In the later relationship with Keiko day after day, he slowly accepted this simple and kind girl.
Therefore, when Katsurako's boyfriend comes to the store again to stir up trouble, Yamashita beats someone up, because Yamashita is still on bail, so he goes to jail again.
This time in prison, the opposite of the last time.
This time, there was a beloved woman waiting for him, a kind neighbor waiting for him, and a whole new life waiting for him.
Although the girlfriend's belly is someone else's child, the child's father can only be him, not Katsurako's ex-boyfriend.
At this time, he was no longer confined to the rules and regulations of right and wrong, morality, marriage, past experiences, etc., and gained true freedom.
In the beginning, when Yamashita came to this village, he was afraid that others would know his identity as a "murderer" and hide it everywhere. Later, his fellow inmate Takasaki posted a large poster with the word "murderer" on the door of his barbershop, and neighbors including Keiko knew it, but what? Everyone still loves this gentle and ordinary mountain.
No one can be labeled plainly, human nature is fluid, and life is fluid.
You don't have to kill your wife because she thinks she's been morally insulted because she cheated on her, and you don't have to kill yourself because you can't get rid of your inferior boyfriend for the time being.
Don't be framed by social evaluation, moral condemnation, specific life, past experiences, you have freedom at any time, you can choose, you have the opportunity to start over.
Do you know the pregnancy process of eels?
Female eels swim thousands of kilometers away near the equator, encounter sperm that do not know which male eel is discharged in the water, after fertilization the female eel will become pregnant and spawn, and the baby fish will not know who their father is.
The sex of eels is limited by the environment, when there is insufficient food and high population density, eels become male, when the food abundance density is low, it becomes female.
Sperm of unknown origin, randomly changing genders, everything is natural, there is no metaphysical moral critique.
Eels are just alive.
Later, Yamashita released the eel he had been keeping back into the water. This is his true reconciliation with himself and with life.
He had been framed twice. The first time, because of morality, he killed his wife; the second time, because of his experience and his own identity as a murderer, he rejected Katsurako.
Now, he would no longer be framed for anything, now he was only ready to live.