Intentions of Murder / Akai satsui (1964)

To American eyes, Japanese movies can offer so many types of strangeness that it is hard to sort them out. Shohei Imamura’s Intentions of Murder is one of the strangest, in part because it looks so normal. But since it is almost impossible to figure out the motivations behind the characters’ actions, the whole movie becomes another of those Japanese movies in which we understand everything we see and yet seem to understand nothing at all.

The story itself is simple. Left alone while her husband Riichi goes off to a conference, Sadako is followed by Hiraoko who breaks in, robs, and then rapes her. She tries to commit suicide but fails (twice). The young man returns to rape her again and becomes obsessed with her, trying to get her to run away with him. She tries to buy him off with her life savings, then decides to poison him but can’t, only to see him die from a heart problem in front of her. She goes home and pretends nothing ever happened, even when her husband shows her photos with the other man.

Sadako is anything but a sex object, so Hiraoko’s obsession is hard to understand in movie terms, where the star is always beautiful and/or sexy. By Japanese standards, she is a fat lump and is often called that by others. Her personality is almost as blank as her IQ. She is a terrible housekeeper and has almost no control of son, who has covered all the screens and walls with drawings. She somehow eventually escapes from her predicament, but it is not so much by determination as by simple immobility. She is one of those persons who just IS; she has no design or plan, she is just there.

Her marital sexual relations are not all that different from her rapes. In fact, her first sex with Riichi is a rape, when she was working as a maid in the household. Presumably, that made her pregnant, so she became the wife, though there’s not much difference in her life except that the two moved out of Riichi’s mother’s house. Though there is no evidence directly given of childhood abuse, she calls Riichi Papa whenever they have sex, just as do the mother and daughter in Insect Woman. As it turns out, because of the way Japanese legally register their families, she is not even recorded as the wife, though she does not find this out until very late in the movie. Nor is she recorded as her son’s mother — the family actually registered the child as Riichi’s brother — so in her one stroke of initiative, after much prodding from a neighbor, she goes to court to get the register changed.

Riichi is a librarian and looks and acts like a stereotypical librarian. He is a nit-picker who checks the household accounts each day. He wears a surgical mask whenever in public and as soon as he comes home makes Sadako get out the vaporizer. Yet he has been having a ten-year affair with the even more stereotypical female librarian, with her coke-bottle glasses and her silly attempts to arrange a rendevous among the bookshelves. Why Riichi did not marry her is never explained — they were sleeping together before he raped Sadako, and she was fertile, even getting an abortion at one time. Surely she would have been a more socially acceptable wife for Riichi’s demanding mother-in-law. It is her photos that Riichi shows to Sadako, for she has become obsessed with proving there is an affair going on.

Hiraoko’s motivations are perhaps even less clear. He is ill, presumably with a combination of TB and heart problems. He tells us that he picked Sadako simply because he saw her husband leave on the train, but why he becomes so sexually obsessed with her is as inexplicable to him as to us.

Only as I began writing this did I realize that Sadako is another Insect Woman. Unlike Tome in that movie, Sadako simply plants herself and stays. Tome has plots and plans, many of them not successful, but Sadako has to be forced into activity. She works as industriously as an ant, but incompetently. She just survives. Even when we hear her voice-overs, they do not clarify the past or her plans.

The train is a persistent factor. The home abuts on the raised tracks, as visually shut in as the houses of Ditch though much more prosperous (they have a TV and a refrigerator).  Many scenes take place at stations, stops, or on the train itself. There is often a sense of the New Wave guerilla film-making, with lots of locations, telephotos, possible hand-helds, and exteriors that must have been extremely difficult to shoot. At the same time, many of these scenes are meticulously planned, such as the brilliant bit when from the platform we see Haraoko pursue Sadako the length of the train only to continue the scene in the last platform in the reverse direction as the train begins to leave the station, the camera and sound crew racing to keep up. It takes extremely sophisticated film-making to look so casual.

However you feel about the film as a whole, it is a remarkable look inside a marriage where the distinction between wife and maid is all but impossible to define and where it does not seem to bother either participant that there is no distinction between the two. As I said, it is a strange movie.