Shōhei Imamura's first film as director was Stolen Desire, while his third film was Endless Desire. Both movies depict the struggles of the defiant underclass, those who dream of more and in so doing end up on the outskirts of society. The very little I've gathered of him over the years suggests that this is a theme which resonates throughout his work and I'm looking forward to exploring more, although Halloween season looms large and all of my recent cinematic interests will have to take a backseat for a month. Thats fine. Anyway Endless Desire is about veterans of the Pacific Theater of WWII coming back together ten years later, to search for morphine buried during the war. It's very much a film that says Lets take a hard look at how we're doing after our country was destroyed. Some people make Endless Desire and some people make Godzilla, and I love em both. I liked watching the dynamics of this group of crooks fall apart especially once they start dying, Shōichi Ozawa as the teacher was so fucking annoying chewing with his mouth open, man the movie goes out of its way to make him annoying as fuck. I love when a movie takes time out to say fuck this guy in particular, don't you hate this dude we've created? It's so satisfying how the movie becomes more and more frenetic as it goes on. Very good film and the opening credits are fucking awesome!
Love this lean, gritty film, surely a cousin to Clouzot’s Wages of Fear (1953). Set ten years after the war and getting off from a train bound for Hiroshima (hmm), the story has a group of four men and one woman convening to attempt to dig up a trove of morphine that was stashed away and worth millions. As a butcher shop has now been built over the top of it, they hatch a plan to dig a tunnel from a nearby office space that they rent out. As they wallow in the grime, passions flare, as the men are all drawn to the woman (Sanae Nakahara). “Whoever digs the most can have me,” she says, stirring up both sex and greed, maybe the prime motivating forces for men. She’s a tough cookie, smacking guys who feel her up while she’s washing her hair in the sink, fending off a rape attempt from the violent guy who’s escaped prison, and seducing the landlord’s son so he’ll unwittingly help cover for what they’re up to in the wee hours of the night. She’s a fantastic character, played marvelously by Nakahara.I loved the visual flourishes Shohei Imamura gives us, like the camera angles and the split screen above and below ground at various tense moments. The story is a little silly at times as the landlord’s son is in a love triangle, but it ultimately serves the plot well, and the action revolving around jealousy, violence, and double crosses more than made up for it. The howling storm in the climactic scene was truly memorable, and I really enjoyed this one.
Compromised by some bad comedy, but in the final third retains complete focus on a total nihilism of form with corpses jutting out of the dirt and demons pulling the living into hell. Imamura announces himself and his intentions as a director in that section.
