The Eel 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, Rovi
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