When it comes to Japanese master directors, Shohei Imaimura is one that should not be ignored. As the only director in the history of Asian cinema to win two Palme d'Ors, he was a student of another Japanese film master, Yasujiro Ozu, but his later film style was very different from Ozu's.
Masahira Imamura's films are always filled with what he calls "maggot-like" characters, he shows a cruel, primitive, and broken Japanese society, and his films are like a scalpel that cuts through the japanese mask, thus deeply stabbing and awakening a generation of Japanese people.
The film, called Revenge on Me, is typical of the Masahira-esque story of Imamura: an oppressed class, an erotic impulse in a forgotten region, driven by perverse antisocial desires. Looking down on the protagonist with a hint of mockery and pity, the film also reveals Imamura's disappointment and sorrow for Japanese society at that time.
"Revenge in Me" is a masterpiece of Imamura Changping's seven or eight years of dormancy, based on the real serial murder story, but the biggest difference from other crime films is that Imamura Changping does not constantly approach the perpetrator's motives for killing to those movies, but tries his best to avoid the reason for the hero Yuzu's killing, only showing the process of his crime. As a result, the audience is often confused by the male protagonist's unprovoked killing behavior, and the male protagonist is completely established as a simple "murderer" symbol.
This existentialist character is not simply discarded in a simple social context, and although Imamura does not clearly indicate the background of the times in the film, it hints at our chaotic era everywhere. At the beginning of the film, an old woman discovers a suspected Korean drunkard, and in a conversation with another old woman, she discovers that it is a dead Japanese. The appearance of Korean drunkards reflects the discriminated status of Korean overseas Chinese at that time, revealing whether this should be a war or a post-war period.
In the flashback, the ship conquest that Yuzu Gong witnessed in his childhood was exactly 1938, when Japan carried out the war of aggression against China, and according to the retrospection of time, it is more convinced that the series of crimes committed by Yuzu when he grew up is the period when Japan is close to defeat or defeat.
It is not a coincidence, then, that "Revenge on Me" places Yuzu in this era, which is exactly the Japanese era that Masahira Imamura deeply feels. In the 1960s, a new wave of Japanese cinema was set off in Japan, and its film style was known for its complex flashback structure, the insertion of fantasy and symbolic fragments, discordant composition, handheld and incoherent editing, and it was committed to breaking the traditional Japanese aesthetic and showing the confused generation of young people in Japan in an extremely personal style.
Among them, Imamura Shohei, as the main force, the first New Wave debut "Pigs and Warships", depicts the chaotic living conditions of Japanese young people who cannot live on their own. The style full of violence and sarcasm is still just right in "Revenge on Me".
The setting of the background of "Revenge on Me" directly affects the construction of the character of Yuzu, who breaks through the character image of a simple self-conscious existentialist, but a small person who is more realistic and oppressed by the times and fate and has nowhere to go. His destruction was not just Hamlet-style self-destruction, but in that decadent Japanese society, the repressed primitive force finally sought an extreme outlet —that is, revenge.
As mentioned above, there is no clear motive for killing in the film, so does the "revenge" of the title refer to an empty reference, or does it really have its symbol? The master of the film will not set for no reason, precisely because Yuzu kills indiscriminately, facing this vast society, and the object of his revenge is this era, and it is also the fate of the self he foresaw since childhood (that is, repeating the mistakes of his father's generation).
The reason why Imamura implicitly expresses the background in the film is actually the motivation of Yuzu who is not a motive. In the movie, for what exactly did Yuzu brutally kill those innocent social masses? For the money? Obviously, not all of them, Yuzu is not a materialistic person, especially in some cases he is extremely generous, and the Yujin family does not belong to the lower class, his father has a certain property, a mansion, Yuxia does not need to kill so many people for that simple money.
Here we have to point out that the narrative technique that Imamura plays with in the film is obviously a very typical New Wave narrative style, multiple clues are entangled, and even sudden time and space, all the implicit conditions are shattered by the complexity of the narrative logic, such as when Yuzu killed the lawyer, it was almost like a chance encounter on the taxi - a conversation on the train - back to the lawyer's home The lawyer is dead. Much of this omitting, in particular, obscures the motives for the killing, and the explicit motif of "revenge" seems to be difficult to support by arguments, as the object of his murder has almost no previous history to trace.
Under such a non-linear narrative, there is a clip that attracts our attention, that is, when Yuzu witnessed his father compromise with the imperial army in his childhood, agreeing to the family's subsistence fishing boat being requisitioned. In that scene, the young Yuzu is very brave in the face of the imperial army, picking up a stick and beating the soldiers, but is stopped by the weak (also to save the life of the family) father, and humbly asks the imperial army for forgiveness. This move caused the father's towering image to collapse completely–even Caused Yuzu to speak out about his father's cowardice himself—and the "father" referred to as the father's authority was also the "emperor" and Japanese society.
Understanding this paragraph, it is easy to understand the series of actions after Yuzu, in Japanese society, patriarchy has always been supreme, and Yuzu compromised under the majesty of patriarchy, but this compromise was not for dignity, but for deeper humiliation. Since then, he has seen his father's weakness and hypocrisy, which is also the origin of his beginning to dislike Japanese society, and in the face of social injustice, he has seen his father struggle to collapse without any struggle, and his father's failure has directly led to the collapse of his faith.
This reminds us of another Japanese New Wave director Nagisa Oshima's debut film The Cruel Story of Youth, which ends with the previous generation facing the confused next generation saying, "It is our failure that has caused your failure." The same is true in "Revenge in Me", Yu Xia's revenge is revenge for his father, but also revenge for Japanese society, there is no hope in this era, only in the killing, he can find the real sense of rebellion.
At the end of the movie, the dialogue between the father and Yujin reveals the motives of Yujin's revenge more deeply, when Yujin has been arrested and imprisoned, his father goes to visit the prison, and says to Yujin that Yuxia does not dare to kill him, only dares to kill people who do not hate. Yuzu looked angrily at his father and pressed hard, just when we all thought that Yuzu was going to kill his father, the camera suddenly turned, and at this time, the father was holding Yuzu's ashes and preparing to sprinkle it on the foot of the mountain.
He ultimately failed to take revenge on his ideal object of revenge—a father-killing complex that accompanied him almost his entire life. Freud pointed out: "Human beings are born with a 'father-killing complex', and from birth, he is destined to fight with his father in order to get rid of the dominant and dominated position, to fight for the right to independence and freedom, and then to grasp the dominance of the family and the initiative of society." Yuzu's revenge is his desperate desire to gain power, and his reluctance to take revenge on his father is also a revelation of the confused young people of that era, who are powerless against the authority of their fathers, who are doomed to be shrouded in the double dilemma of their father's failure and self-rebellion.
As mentioned above, although Imamura was a student of Ozu, he was very different from Ozu in his later film style, and the relationship between the two even broke down in the end, largely due to the inconsistent views on film art. Imatoshi has pointed out that Ozu's films are too "official", because most of Ozu's films are japanese middle-class, lamenting the collapse of reeds and alienation, while Imamura prefers to represent "actual" Japan—the marginal, confused, and repressed lower classes of Japan.
Tadao Sato said: "Ozu wants to portray the beautiful side of human nature, and Imamura wants the ugly side, the real side. Whether in terms of choosing the subject matter, or in terms of aesthetic hobbies and interests, Ozu and Imamura are exactly the opposite in everything. In "Revenge on Me", this evil of human nature is interpreted to the fullest, especially with Yujin's final cruel strangulation of the innkeeper Achun, who is devoted to him and helps her hide.
But how exactly does this killing work for a moral trial? Because the inn Ah Chun has proposed more than once that she wants to die - she is a miserable woman, her mother murderer is imprisoned, and in her youth, she is supported by herself, and she has to be blindsided, and then she can only be a second mother, and the hotel she runs has become a prostitute. So, did the end of Yuzu's cruel life give her a happy death on another level? Imamura gave up the psychological analysis of the characters, and Yuzu killed Ah Chun almost at a moment without warning, one second he was still in love with a woman, and the next second he was poisoned. However, unlike his usual killing, after the woman's death, Yuzu seemed to caress her corpse with some nostalgia.
Before that, Yuzu witnessed the woman being ravaged by her husband, whom she did not love, and the woman's mother was also present, and stopped Yuzu, who wanted to kill the man on the spot. At that time, the camera took Yuzu and his mother as the foreground, and the scene of the woman being violated in the later scene was completely obscured, and the inhumanity of this scene could only be judged by the voiceover and the unbearable expression of the two people in the foreground. Yuzu understands that this society cannot complete his ideal rebellion with revenge, this society is rotten, and his violent desire cannot shake the cold-blooded nature of the people in this society.
"Revenge on Me" is taken from the Bible Romans chapter 12 verse 19: "Dear brother, do not do justice to yourself, but rather give in and let the Lord's wrath be upon him." For it is written in scripture that the Lord said, "I will repay the wrongs that have been done to me." The implication is, don't take revenge on yourself, but let God avenge you. And Yuzu knows deeply that God is dead, and the miserable Ah Chun will not have God to rule for her, so he kills her and makes "revenge on me" to be "God" himself. His revenge is to break through the so-called moral shackles of this society, to break the false pretense of his father, and to achieve the "free running" he wants.