• 豚と軍艦 (Pigs and Battleships)

6/1/21 (Tues)

The wild 1961 film that put director Imamura Shohei on the map (and got him banned from studio for two years). It’s a black comedy mixed with social satire about Japanese civilians and American sailors in Yokosuka, a coastal town near Tokyo that hosts a major US naval base, around 1960.

Japanese in this town are still largely in poverty scrounging for whatever they can get, many relying on soldiers’ appetite for women and booze. The main character, Kinta, is a chinpira with dreams of yakuza glory who works as a pimp trying to lure sailors to a brothel. The yakuza offer him a job bringing pigs to the troops, from which they take scraps to sell off on the black market. (Black markets still existed in 1960?? Apparently.) Not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, he is steadfastly loyal to his group and boss without noticing that the feeling is hardly mutual: his buddies ask him to take the rap for a murder (promising him riches when he gets out in just a few years), force him to deal with a dead body, put him in charge of stolen goods and such, clearly with no intention whatsoever of living up to their vows. But hope does not die easily for Kinta.

Meanwhile, Kinta’s girlfriend Haruko wants to escape with him to a nice steady job in a Kawasaki factory. Her mother, having effectively sold off her eldest daughter to a US sailor for a steady income, aims to do the same for Haruko, who is disgusted by the idea. The film has various strands beyond that, but the central story is the conflict between Haruko, who longs for a normal even if poor life, and Kinta, who can’t abandon his fantasy of a yakuza family. He finally promises to join her after he finishes one last job that night, and she joyfully dumps the American sailor that her mother has arranged for her and runs to the station to wait for her new future with Kinta. Things naturally don’t work out as planned. To say the least.

It’s impossible to sum up the outrageous criss-crossing stories here, all centering on double-crossing and back-stabbing of some sort. Numerous foreigners appear to lord it over their former enemy – the American sailors, of course, plus a Chinese wheeler-dealer and a Korean landlord (I think; the woman complains of garlic on his breath) – and Imamura holds nothing back in criticizing Japan’s dependence on the Americans in particular. The film was made just around the time of the violent Anpo protests over the US-Japan Security Treaty and is a perfect snapshot of the climate in those times. There is an astonishing climax when Kinta, in pursuit by the police as well as both gangs (it’s complicated), ends up with a machine gun in his hands and shoots madly in every direction. Thousands of pigs then escape from trucks (ditto) and rampage through the streets, crushing some key characters along the way in a surreal sequence. A crazed shootout then leaves bodies everywhere. In a fantastic coda, Haruko is shown going off determinedly to the train to Kawasaki to start a new life in a long shot from above, passing a group of girls who are running to meet a new boatload of fresh sailors.

Imamura supposedly apprenticed under Ozu for a number of films, including the quiet masterwork Tokyo Story, but that is nowhere evident in the madcap antics on display here. The characters and camera are constantly in motion, and the story (or stories) move forward like a stampede. Some artsy touches sneak in, like the dizzily spinning ceiling shot of the rape scene, but overall nothing feels superfluous. The pigs are an obvious symbol throughout, including a sequence in which yakuza members are shocked to discover that the pig they’re eating has itself just eaten the crushed up bones of a man they killed – a pig-eat-pig world. But the symbolism is not overplayed, especially among the loony action surrounding it. Excess is the word here, and it works beautifully.

Yoshimura Jitsuko gives a standout performance in her film debut as the tough and determined Haruko, giving back as hard as she takes it. The women in general were excellent throughout. The men, including the star Nagato Hiroyuki, were nearly all way over-the-top in their acting, but maybe that was deliberate on the director’s part given how well it fit the atmosphere. This film was apparently part of a Japanese New Wave, but I can pretty safely say that it’s in a category of its own. Strongly recommended.