• 盗まれた欲情 (Stolen Desire)

3/16/22 (Wed)

Imamura Shohei’s directorial debut of 1958 is a rather silly comedy about a traveling theater group. Not much of the later provocative Imamura on view here, though he does concentrate on the lower classes in a struggling troupe that mixes popularized versions of classical pieces like Chushingura with titillating girlie shows to bring in unsophisticated rural audiences. In a sign of the future Imamura, it features numerous loud outbursts among the actors and crowds, leering audience members and peeping Toms, pilfering of money and geese, a reference to eating dogs, actors picking their noses, and an impressively vicious catfight between two actresses, among other delights. But this was all in a broadly comic mood.

There’s an artistic angle of sorts as one of the actors (Nagato Hiroyuki), a pouting college graduate who wants to offer modern variations on the old stories to bring the troupe into the future, clashes with the older head of the group (Takizawa Osamu), who insists on sticking with the tried and true. In light of Imamura’s subsequent career, it is tempting to see this as the director himself butting heads with conservative studio heads, but again it is treated too lightly to be taken seriously. Meanwhile, the actor gets involved in an unwilling triangle as the woman who aggressively pursues him (Kita Michie) is the younger sister of the married woman he truly loves (Minamida Yoko). Everything naturally works out as the woman gets her man and the troupe leaves triumphantly for the next town.

The acting was variable. Nagato was going through the motions here (he would work with Imamura again more effectively in the bold Pigs & Battleships and The Insect Woman), while Takizawa as troupe head and Nishimura Ko as a loudmouth actor were overly exaggerated. The women did better: Kita and especially Minamida (Nagato’s future wife) were fine as the sisters. The most interesting part of this fluff was seeing just what Imamura was breaking away from when he went independent a few years later. For a sample of what a film on a traveling acting troupe can really look like, check out the great remake at around the same time by Imamura’s ex-boss Ozu Yasujiro of his silent masterwork Floating Weeds.