The Eel / Unagi (1997)

The Eel was one of Japan’s and Shohei Imamura’s most highly regarded movies at the time of its release, with the Palme d’or at Cannes and Kinema Junpo‘s best picture award and widespread critical and popular success in America and Europe. I remember liking it a lot when I first saw it and looked forward to a new viewing. Seen now in retrospect, however, it seems disappointing in its predictability, almost as if it were designed for foreign distribution.

Yamashita (Koji Yakusho) is released from prison on parole after having stabbed and killed his wife after catching her with another man. He takes over an abandoned barber shop on the outskirts of town, where he keeps his one confidant, an eel that became his pet in prison. Slowly the business prospers, in part due to the appearance of Keiko as the assistant he doesn’t really need. He found her after a suicide attempt and she moved in with the Buddhist priest who also acts as Yamashita’s parole contact. At this point, just about anyone who has ever seen a movie knows what will happen next.

People assume they are a couple, especially after she begins showing the early signs of pregnancy, but the child’s father is actually the “wrong man” who led to her suicide attempt. Yamashita rebuffs all her attempts at personal contact, even refusing to accept the bento boxes she makes for him to take while fishing. The ex-lover was a loan shark who tricked Keiko’s demented mother into giving him her life savings, and when Keiko takes the bankbook from his office, he comes to get it back. In the ensuing melee, Yamashita claims fatherhood of the baby. He releases his eel into the river but is sent back for more jail time after the violation of his parole, with Keiko promising to be waiting for him when he returns.

This does not necessarily mean that everything is predictable. Most obviously, though Yamashita tries to protect Keiko in the fight, he never resorts to the razors and other blades easily to hand. The fight itself is more comic than dangerous, with Yamashita sustaining the only real injury from one of Keiko’s blows. The barbershop collects a number of eccentrics. A young man uses the barber pole at night as the centerpiece of the “landing strip for UFOs” that he has constructed. Makato Sato makes a very rare screen appearance as the fisherman who takes Yamashita out at night, though Yamashita refuses to spear the eels and lets all his catch go free. Keiko’s mother is convinced she is a flamenco dancer (which perhaps she was, given the amount of savings she has made).

Apparently, there is no parole system as in America. The priest has in effect simply agreed to be the guarantor of Yamashita’s good behavior for the last two years of his sentence, and Yamashita has no regular visits or reports to make.

Nor does sex really enter into the picture, though Keiko looks enough like his dead wife that some have thought they were played by the same actress. She is brought to the shop by the priest’s wife mainly to help her own recovery. She sleeps at the temple every night but during the day does cleaning, cooks lunch, and becomes the smiling face for new customers that Yamashita can’t provide. Her attempts to make some personal connection are not romantic but rather the simple conversation and activities of daily life.

Basically, the eel of the title is not the eel that Yamashita has kept in his aquarium; rather, it is Yamashita himself. Keiko gradually manages to break his own confinement, finally releasing him from his shell just as she accidentally breaks the aquarium in the melee. It is all well made and subtly performed, with moments of humor. The killing of his wife, with blood spattered all over him and the lens of the camera, might satisfy even Miike. Still, from this distance it seems little more than its professional surface, and it comes as quite a surprise to find  it was directed by Imamura.