#Bumon Kahara

[byneddiedingo]

Jitsuko Yoshimura in Pigs and Battleships (Shohei Imamura, 1961)

Cast: Hiroyuki Nagato, Jitsuko Yoshimura, Masao Mishima, Tetsuro Tanba, Shiro Osaka, Takeshi Kato, Shoichi Ozawa, Yoko Minimida, Hideo Sato, Eijiro Tono, Akira Yamauchi, Sanae Nakahara, Kin Sugai, Bumon Kahara. Screenplay: Hisashi Yamanouchi, Gisashi Yamauchi, based on a novel by Kazu Otsuka. Cinematography: Shinsaku Himeda. Art direction: Kimihiko Nakamura. Film editing: Mutsuo Tanji. Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi.

It seems to be common in critiques of Shohei Imamura's work to contrast him with his mentor, Yasujiro Ozu. The world of Ozu's films is that of the settled middle class families, with their marriageable daughters and salarymen breadwinners, filmed in the stately, low camera angle style that almost immediately identifies Ozu's work. Imamura's films are full of low-lifes, people struggling to get along by any means necessary, with flamboyant camerawork, such as the spectacularly crowded widescreen compositions in Pigs and Battleships. A contrast of Ozu and Imamura is rather like a contrast of Jane Austen and Charles Dickens: Both do things with radically different means, the one with a raucous, satiric assortment of colorful characters, the other with a quiet, ironic examination of manners and mores. But both Ozu and Imamura share something: an admiration for strong women. In the case of Pigs and Battleships, it's Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura), struggling to find herself in the hurlyburly of Yokosuka, the port city infested with American sailors. She has had the misfortune to fall in love with the goofball Kinta, who wants to make his name as a yakuza, getting involved with the gang's pig-raising scheme. Hiroyuki Nagato gives a hilariously loosey-goosey performance as Kinta, mugging like Jerry Lewis when he really wants to be Humphrey Bogart. It's not entirely clear what Haruko really sees in Kinta, but the performance of the two actors together is highly entertaining. Although the film plays mostly for comedy, culminating in the destruction of much of the red-light district by a stampede of pigs, it features several murders and the rape of Haruko by three American sailors, with the result that it's dominated by a kind of Swiftian satiric tone.

[badmovieihave]

Bad movie I have Blind Woman’s Curse 1970

[twilightronin]

Blind Woman’s Curse 1970

[ozu-teapot]

Pigs & Battleships - Shôhei Imamura - 1961

Bumon Kahara

[twilightronin]

Blind Woman’s Curse 1970