Themes: Starting Over, Redemption, Crimes of Passion
Main Cast: Koji Yakusho, Misa Shimizu
Release Year: 1997
Country: JP
Run Time: 116 minutes
MPAA Rating: NR
Plot
Veteran filmmaker and perennial iconoclast Shohei Imamura directs this darkly comic tale about love, redemption, and a man's beloved pet eel. The film opens with Takuro Yamashita (Koji Yakusho), a seemingly normal salaryman, learning that his wife might be having an affair. When he catches the couple in flaganto delicto, he freaks out and brutally stabs them both to death. Eight years later, Yamashita is released on parole into the care of a Buddhist priest living in rural Chiba prefecture. Far away from his former life, yet still plagued with memories of his crime, Yamashita decides to start anew by opening a barbershop on a quiet road next to a canal. Though inward looking and self-conscious, he eventually befriends a bumptious but good-hearted day laborer, and a construction worker who's obsessed with UFOs. His most fateful encounter though is with a woman named Keiko (Misa Shimizu), who he discovers unconscious following a suicide attempt. Looking to put a few of her own demons to bed, Keiko decides to stay in this sleepy corner of Japan and help her savior with his barbershop. Initially against the idea -- she bears a striking resemblance to his dead spouse -- he eventually agrees and even grows to like having her around. This film won the Grand Prix at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Review
Master filmmaker Shohei Imamura won his second Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival with this oddball tale about a man and his pet eel. Though this film exhibits Imamura's trademark fascination with the messy underside of humanity, where barely repressed sexual and violent urges threaten to bubble to the surface, Unagi is a quieter, more reflective work compared to the ribald absurdity of such earlier masterworks as Insect Woman (1963) and The Pornographer (1966). The film's deceptively savage opening, in which average salaryman Takuro Yamashita is suddenly driven to stab his philandering wife, recalls the rawness and brutality of Imamura's later Vengeance is Mine (1979). Yet, unlike the protagonist of that film, the blood-splattered Yamashita calmly bicycles to the police station and turns himself in. Imamura leaves his takes long, employing an unobtrusive yet slightly distanced visual style to create the vague illusion that one is watching the film's events unfold through the same glass tank in which Yamashita keeps his pet eel. Koji Yakusho's performance as Yamashita carries the same everyman quality that he first revealed in Shall We Dance? (1996). Brilliantly mixing the comic and the horrific, Imamura's assured, finely textured direction charms and entertains as it astonishes. ~ Jonathan Crow, All Movie Guide
Acting on the advice of an anonymous note, Takuro Yamashita (Yakusho) returns home early one night to find his wife in bed with another man. He kills her then turns himself in to the police. After being released from prison, he opens a barber shop. He helps save Keiko (Shimizu) from a suicide attempt, after which she works at his shop. It becomes clear that Keiko has romantic affections for Takuro, but his reciprocation is redirected towards his pet eel.
