• 復讐するは我にあり (Vengeance Is Mine)

3/5/22 (Sat)

Imamura Shohei’s hard-hitting 1979 film is based on the case of an actual serial killer in Japan active in 1964 just before the Olympics. The title is taken from Deuteronomy, where it is God who insists on that honor (“Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, says the Lord”). But it is not clear here what the main character is taking vengeance against. His motives are unknown from start to finish as his victims include both close friends and total strangers. He murders only those who pose no harm to him, as his father points out; for instance, he strangles a woman who adores him, but runs from another who threatens to cut off his testicles. His lover’s mom calls him a “wimp” for not killing what he really wants to kill. That is, in the case of the lovers and friends he murders along the way, he may have felt threatened by his own feelings, preferring to remain aloof from society than tied to anyone. The people he hated did not pose such threat. That said, as noted, he’s just as happy to kill people he’s never met. His job as truck driver is by nature a lonely profession, but he seems to actively resist being tied to anyone. In a flashback, we see him grow furious as a child when his father humiliates himself before a military officer by ultimately agreeing to provide his village’s boats for the Emperor, even apologizing for his initial refusal. The child strikes the officer in anger with a club, then strikes his father as well. I assumed that the club would reappear later with the Japanese equivalent of “Rosebud”, but Imamura doesn’t resort to easy answers.

Films that Imamura actually made in the early 1960s like Pigs and Battleships and The Insect Woman were set against a widespread mood of nihilism as Japan’s defeat in the war and perceived subservience to capitalist American values had led to a loss of purpose and identity among the younger generation. Though this film was made much later, when Japan’s economy was strong and memories of pre-war Japan were thinning, it reflects that sensibility in the killer’s random, meaningless urge to destroy even (or especially) those that cared for him. Imamura’s presentation is dispassionate and nonjudgmental, making his message of alienation more subtle than his previous works. The implicit criticism of the West is highlighted by the fact that the killer was raised in a devoted Catholic family on the Goto Islands near Nagasaki, famous for the “hidden Christians” who continued secretly to cling to those values – i.e., essentially reject Japanese values – during the pre-modern samurai era. The conflict between the killer’s Catholic background and his lost soul is a key theme. A bizarre sequence at the end after he is executed shows his widow and father trying to scatter his ashes from a mountaintop, only to see the bones remain stubbornly suspended in midair – that is, the family, and society, can never be free of him.

Ogata Ken is utterly convincing as the killer. He looks like an ordinary businessman rather than a yakuza figure or creepy Jack Nicholson type, allowing him to keep a low profile when needed. That implies disturbingly that anyone out there could be this man. He can turn on the charm when needed but is basically gruff and uncaring of the social niceties even to the police and strangers, much less family and friends. He carries out his murders almost clinically; most are not even shown on screen. Imamura’s theme of how the embrace of individual-oriented Western values has turned people away from Japan’s traditional community-based society is pushed to an extreme by Ogata’s utterly self-centered portrayal. His normality in his various disguises as lawyer, professor and such make his transformation to killer all the more scary. It’s hard to envision anyone else in the role. (The film also indicates thankfully that the strange chest hair he sported in Mishima was fake.)

The other two standouts were those playing the characters that stood up against the killer, Mikuni Rentaro as the killer’s father-in-law and Kiyokawa Nijiko (later in Imamura’s remake of The Ballad of Narayama) as his lover’s cantankerous mother. Mikuni has a great scene in the bath where his Catholic morals come into conflict with his carnal urges for his daughter-in-law (Baisho Mitsuko), who does not feel as constrained. (The fact that they’re naked in a bath together is not in itself necessarily strange in a Japanese context.) The female victims, Baisho and Ogawa Mayumi, were fine if less distinctive in their roles, and the cast in general was excellent as per Inamura’s standards.

Imamura stages his scenes carefully and has an interesting way of filming through windows, doorways or such, distancing us from the action. The screenplay by Baba Masaru, who also wrote the memorable yakuza flick Pale Flower, managed to present the story of a mass murderer with an impressive lack of histrionics. A powerful film.