|
|
|
The Eel: Limited Edition
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Radiance Films Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (14th April 2025). |
|
The Film
 APFF Award (Best Actor): Kôji Yakusho (winner) and Best Director: Shôhei Imamura (winner) - Asia-Pacific Film Festival, 1997 Golden Frog: Shigeru Komatsubara (hominated) - Camerimage, 1997 Palme d'Or: Shôhei Imamura (winner) - Cannes Film Festival, 1997 Hochi Film Award (Best Actor): Kôji Yakusho (winner) and Best Supporting Actress: Mitsuko Baishô (winner) - Hochi Film Awards, 1997 Independent Spirit Award (Best Foreign Film): Shôhei Imamura (nominated) - Film Independent Spirit Awards, 1997 Award of the Japanese Academy (Best Film): The Eel (nominee), Best Actor: Kôji Yakusho (winner), Best Actress: Misa Shimizu (nominated), Best Supporting Actor: Akira Emoto (nominee), Best Supporting Actress: Mitsuko Baishô (winner), Best Supporting Actress: Etsuko Ichihara (nominated), Best Director: Shôhei Imamura (winner), Best Screenplay: Shôhei Imamura, Daisuke Tengan, and Motofumi Tomikawa (nominated), Best Cinematography: Shigeru Komatsubara (nominated), Best Lighting: Yasuo Iwaki (nominated), Best Editing: Hajime Okayasu (nominated), Best Art Direction: Hisao Inagaki (nominated), Best Music Score: Shinichirô Ikebe (nominated), and Best Sound: Kenichi Benitani (nominated) - Awards of the Japanese Academy, 1998 Kinema Junpo Award (Best Film): Shôhei Imamura (winner), Best Actor: Kôji Yakusho (winner), and Best Supporting Actress: Mitsuko Baishô (winner) - Kinema Junpo Awards, 1998 Mainichi Film Concours (Best Supporting Actor): Tomorô Taguchi (winner), Best Supporting Actress: Mitsuko Baishô (winner), and Best Director: Shôhei Imamura (winner) - Mainichi Film Concours, 1998 Blue Ribbon Award (Best Actor): Kôji Yakusho (winner) and Best Supporting Actress: Mitsuko Baishô (winner) - Blue Ribbon Awards, 1998 Top 10 Film Award (Best Film): Shôhei Imamura (nominated) - Cahiers du Cinéma, 1997 Having received multiple anonymous letters claiming that his wife (Tegami's Chiho Terada) is being unfaithful to him when he goes out fishing overnight, salary man Takuro Yamashita (Cure's Kôji Yakusho) surprised his wife and her lover one night and stabbed her to death before turning himself in to the local police in the numb aftermath. Eight years later, he is released on good behavior and warned by the warden against being drawn into any kind of trouble. Takuro became a barber in prison and his parole officer Reverend Jiro Nakajima (Zatoichi Meets Yojimbo's Fujio Tokita) takes him back to his seaside village and sets him up renovating an abandoned barber shop for his new trade. The rebuilding work gives him an excuse to keep to himself – with only the pet eel he raised in a prison pond as his sole company – despite attempts by the locals to befriend him including boat builder Takasaki (Shin Godzilla's Akira Emoto), loner Misaki (The 47 Ronin's Ken Kobayashi) who wants to borrow the light up barber pole to summon UFOs, and bookie Misato (Black Rain's Sabu Kawahara) who hopes that Takuro will give racing tips to his customers. While out fishing for eel food, Takuro discovers the unconscious body of Keiko Hattori (Shall We Dance?'s Misa Shimizu) who has swallowed some pills and he hesitates in acting to save her, asking Takasaki, Misaki, and Misato to accompany him as he goes to the police. Keiko survives and convalesces with the Nakajimas, and Jiro's wife Misako (Vengeance is Mine's Mitsuko Baishô) suggests to Takuro that it would be good for Keiko to help him around the shop lest she fall back into her depression and try it again. Takuro reluctantly agrees but tries to keep his emotional distance. Just as he starts to let his guard down in front of her and his would-be friends, Takuro fears intimacy with Keiko as well as being exposed for his crime when the new area garbage collector turns out to be fellow parolee Yuji Nozawa (Pulse's Shô Aikawa) who has turned to Buddhism but judges Takuro for not being similarly penitent, sending Takuro threatening notes and following Keiko back to the Nakajima's temple at night. Keiko is hurt by Takuro's emotional distance and is starting to fray under the stress of caring for her mentally unstable mother Fumie (The Face of Another's Etsuko Ichihara) and the attempts of her loan shark boyfriend Eiji (Tetsuo, the Iron Man's Tomorô Taguchi) to get her back into bed and secure an investment of her mother's savings. The Eel marks the return of director Shôhei Imamura who had a roughly twenty-year run of consistent output that became more sporadic through the eighties, with a period of eight years between Black Rain and The Eel (the same length as Takuro's prison sentence). The Eel swept the Japanese and international festival and critics' awards but it is a strangely disjointed experience as far as prime Imamura and Japanese art hourse films; indeed, it feels very much like a quirky nineties independent film – and it may indeed have been that Imamura was keeping an eye on the world cinema boom of the decade and its embrace of the carinvalesque qualities of human existence – with its close-off loner protagonist, found community of eccentrics, and embracing of what it means to be human via some heavy-handed symbolism with the eel representing an inscrutable ideal for repressed Takuro being freed to swim down to the equator and spawn while Keiko lets her id run free in the form of her salsa-dancing mother who seems better off helping to summon UFOs than threatening to kill herself when her daughter wants to put her in a home. Yakusho was nominated and won several awards but his co-stars also make somehwhat underdeveloped characters endearing (including Kawahara's bookie who at first seemed like his character was to be the heavy that turns out to be Taguchi's loan shark). Takuro starting to doubt the existence of the letters he received about his wife's infidelity and whether some (not all) of Yuji's appearances are projections of his guilt is an intriguing but understated aspect of the plot, but the film falters with the final physical confrontation in the barbershop between Takuro and his friends and Eiji and his thugs in which is neither tense nor funny, feeling more like an obligatory step towards the film's open resolution. Imamura would make two more films – Dr. Akagi and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (reunited Yakusho and Shimizu in the leads) – as well as a short for the anthology September 11 before passing away in 2006. 
Video
The Eel was screened at film festivals and exported in its 117 minute theatrical version while Imamura's 134 minute director's cut was given a theatrical release after the shorter cut the same year; as such, the original 35mm camera negative was conformed to the director's cut while the theatrical cut only survives as a video master struck for the Japanese laserdisc and for international home video releases. The non-anamorphic letterboxed master of theatrical cut was what we got stateside from New Yorker Films on DVD and in the U.K. from Artificial Eye while the later Australian PAL DVD release was able to utilize an anamorphic standard definition NTSC master of the director's cut. Radiance Films debuts the director's cut (134:25) and a theatrical cut (116:38) utilizing the same HD master in a branched 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen encode in which it is the unusual case that the shorter cut actually had to utilize a few standard definition inserts for a few shots exclusive to that version. The discrepancy is not that noticeable as this relatively low-budget film has a rather grainy image overall following the opening titles which look a little flat and slightly smeary. The cuts to the theatrical cut appear to be primarily for pacing, and the loss of minor bits seems that much more abrupt after watching the director's cut first even when they are as inconsequential as a single shot of Takuro in his jail cell cleaned up after turning himself in, a few scenes of him and Jiro exploring the rundown barber shop, or Takasaki checking inside the shop for Takuro before coming back outside and noticing him across the street fishing in the stream. Viewers who pick the theatrical cut first might not notice anything amiss but the director's cut simply flows better (one also wonders whether the 117 minute timing of the theatrical cut might have been a means for producer/home video and laserdisc distributor KSS to release the film as a single two-sided CLV laserdisc rather than a two-disc set. 
Audio
The Japanese LPCM 1.0 mono track is undemanding with clear dialogue, sparse scoring, and rather limited sound design owing to the seaside setting in the off-season, but that makes some sequences more impactful from the opening murder to the cacophony Keiko's mother brings with her or the barbershop brawl. Optional English subtitles are free of any obvious errors. 
Extras
Extras start off with a new interview with critic Tony Rayns (27:31) who discusses Imamura's beginnings, originally wanting to apply to Toho because he admired Drunken Angel but was unable to be hired due to a strike so he ended up at Shochiku as an assistant director to Masaki Kobayashi (Harakiri) and Yasujirô Ozu (Tokyo Story), the latter proving to be a bitter experience. He migrated to Nikkatsu where his Pigs and Battleships went over-budget and over-schedule and he would leave and form an independent production company. Ill health and an increasing difficulty in the overall Japanese industry finding funding in the eighties were the reasons that he stopped making films in 1989 and Rayns suggests that his son Daisuke Tengan (Audition) was responsible for getting him back into filmmaking for his final trio of films. Rayns discusses how the film differs from his earlier films yet references them as well as recurring thematic interests in the "earthy vulgarities of the working class." The disc also includes a new interview with screenwriter Daisuke Tengan (18:52) who discusses the source novel by Akira Yoshimura – itself based on a true crime – and the liberties taken with adapting it, his initial outline and drafting before he left the production after an argument with his father, his father's dissatisfaction with the script completed by Motofumi Tomikawa which was did a revision on before production began. He also discusses his father's interest in communities and peoples' ties to them which were eroding by the eighties and nineties, hence the film's found pseudo-family of characters. Tengan also goes into some depth about the characters, particularly Takuro and Keiko and the reasoning behind their characters' behavior, noting both his and his father's preference for female characters who endure rather than Japanese popular cinema's idealized noble, self-sacrificing females. "1997: A Year to Remember" (13:22) is a visual essay by Tom Mes who discuses the industry mindset and events that lead to that year's reversal of fortune for Japanese cinema after years of decline including the international success of The Eel, the J-horror boom, and wide distribution of theatrical works and directorial debuts of Japanese New Wave filmmakers who had honed their skills in V-Cinema (for more on that, see Arrow Video's upcoming V-Cinema Essentials: Bullets & Betrayal box set). The disc also inclues the theatrical trailer (1:08). 
Packaging
The limited edition first pressing includes a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow, a booklet featuring a newly-translated archival interview with Imamura, and is presented in full-height Scanavo packaging with removable OBI strip leaving packaging free of certificates and markings. 
Overall
Shôhei Imamura's return to the screen after an eight-year absence with The Eel is an odd and uneven work that nevertheless was an integral part of Japanese cinema's late nineties resurgence on the world stage as much as a spiritual cousin to the kind of quirky, independent nineties cinema that had started to emerge earlier in the decade from other parts of the world.
|
|||||
|