• にっぽん昆虫記 (The Insect Woman)

6/6/21 (Sun)

After Imamura Shohei’s previous work, the madcap Pigs and Battleships, I was ready for anything. This 1963 film – the literal Japanese title is a more clinical Chronicle of Japanese Insects – followed an effective two-year ban of the director by Nikkatsu for his over-the-top and over-the-budget Pigs. Still, Imamura, unbowed, held nothing back in his new piece about a ruthless woman who does whatever she can to survive. The brutal results ironically became the biggest-grossing film in his career, which presumably mollified the studio’s concerns.

The opening dispassionately shows a bug struggling to crawl up a mound in a two-step-forward, one-step-backward movement, and the film proper seems to examine its characters similarly under a glass rather than analyze or sympathize with them. The setting is a desperately poor farming community in 1918. Our heroine Tone makes a dramatic entrance: a woman is shown standing, grunting and inelegantly grasping a wall as she gives birth to little Tone, father unknown. Women are clearly in charge here, with men just providing the food and labor. We fast forward eight years, when Tone as a young girl mentions offhand that she sleeps with her stepfather, which we realize doesn’t just mean napping by his side (and to make things worse, this could be her actual father). The movie then jumps to the early war years, when things really start rolling. Tone is called back from factory work by her family and coerced into marrying the landlord’s son to pay off a debt, assured that she won’t have to sleep with him. She’s quickly disabused of that notion when he forces himself upon her, saying that as he’s going to go die for his country, she should do her part as well.

She becomes a maid in a call girl enterprise but is made to prostitute herself by the heartless female owner. She rats out her fellow worker to gain the owner’s trust, then turns in the owner as well under prostitution laws in order to take over the business entirely. She finds a well-off patron and briefly enjoys material happiness, but ends up herself arrested for pimping. She gets out of prison two years later only to discover that she has been supplanted in the lover’s affections by her own daughter. The daughter then steals money from the two-timer and runs off to the countryside. The incensed lover has the chutzpah to ask his old flame Tone, the girl’s mother, to retrieve her. Tone agrees to help in exchange for a promise to buy her a shop in tony Shibuya. We’re left wondering whether she really intends to bring the daughter back for the guy’s vague promises or abscond with his money for a life in the country. She’s shown at the end crawling with difficulty up the mountain back to her hometown, recalling the bug seen climbing at the opening.

With little else to do in their poverty-stricken and uneducated world, the farmers have a free and practical attitude toward sex and don’t seem picky about who their partner will be. They are hardened by life: when Tone gives birth to a daughter, the women see the child simply as another mouth to feed and move to kill it, stopped only by Tone’s pleading. Their situation has warped their set of values. When Tone moves to Tokyo and begins dealing with real society, she quickly adapts, but her hard shell never cracks in her need to survive. The film takes us up to the contemporary Anpo demonstrations of the early 1960s, with Tone still pushing determinedly forward. Our sense is that she will survive somehow.

Numerous events throughout mark the era, signaling periods of change: the announcement of the fall of Singapore, air raids, the Emperor’s surrender broadcast, the Crown Prince’s wedding, the Anpo protests. Still, Tone’s struggles never change. The portraits of the few foreigners that make an appearance – US soldiers (speaking heavily accented Japanese), the daughter’s Korean companion – are hardly flattering, but then few of the Japanese characters are particularly attractive either. When a man shows up at the establishment seeking a virgin, the women pull out blood that they’ve frozen just for the occasion; to speed things up, Tone offers to give her own blood and extends her arm, but they decide to grab blood from their cat instead (which they extract in a wince-inducing scene). Normal human emotions are secondary to the pursuit of material needs. When the stepfather sucks the pus from a sore on Tone’s leg, the erotic nature of the direction recalls his earlier sucking of milk from her breast – repeated later in his deathbed request, in which Tone casts off the civilized veneer gained in Tokyo and pops out her breast in front of everyone for him to suckle. (His barely perceptible request (ちち) is rendered modestly in the subtitle as “milk”, but I think the better word is “teat”.)   Tone has to “un-tame” herself in this feral world.

The clear model here is Mizoguchi and his concern for the plight of women in Japanese society, but one difference is that the women here wouldn’t see themselves as victims. They just pick up and do whatever they have to in order to get ahead. Tone is not especially forward-looking or scheming but focused only on the present, and her decisions are rarely sound. She becomes just as callous as her old boss in her treatment of her employees, while similarly leaving herself open to betrayal. Still, Imamura is never judgmental, preferring to show things coolly as they are. His scenes come off as realistic even at their most dramatic. In a sense, his old boss Ozu did the same in a more reserved manner, giving the impression of simply turning on the camera and letting events take their course. Imamura is similar in that respect, but he looks at the lower echelons of society, where morals and ethics are different beasts from those of Ozu’s distinctly middle-class characters. His camera is never still, giving a nervous energy to the proceedings from start to finish. The interior scenes are nicely claustrophobic, and the crowd scenes are handled with great skill.

Hidari Sachiko is terrific as Tone in the transition from innocence to world weary, and Yoshimura Jitsuko, who starred in Imamura’s previous Pigs and Battleships, does another great turn as Tone’s strong-willed daughter. The cast in general is excellent with an extraordinarily natural take on some disagreeable material. Very impressive from start to finish.

While the English title (also used for an unrelated Korean film some years later) presumably refers to Tone, the Japanese title implies the entirety of Japanese society, which would have been my choice. An eye-opening film in either case.