Als Tochter einer Hure und eines geistig eingeschränkten Trottels hat es die junge Tome nicht leicht. Als sie zu einer Frau heranwächst, missbraucht sie ihr Vater, was zur Normalität wird. Als sie während der zweiten Weltkrieges auf einem Bauernhof ausharrt, kommt es auch dort zu sexuellen Übergriffen, sodass Tome selbst Mutter einer Tochter wird. In den Nachwehen des Krieges zieht sie in die Stadt und betätigt sich zunächst als Kindermädchen und schließlich sogar als Organisatorin eines illegalen Callgirlrings…
The Insect Woman läuft in 1 Kino in London - nächste Vorstellung Samstag, 31. Oktober um 13:30 im Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Nächste Vorstellungen: Samstag, 31. Oktober.
Vollständiger Spielplan
Spielzeiten zu The Insect Woman, jeden Morgen aktualisiert
Wähle dein Kino und bekomm einen Hinweis, bevor der Film aus dem Programm fällt.
One day, legendary filmmaker Park Chan-wook walked out of a store with a box of Pocky. Outside of the store, he saw a poor kid waiting for his autograph. The kid was a huge fan of Park and wanted to be a film director.Park gave him his box of Pocky and a copy of Spike Lee's masterpiece, Oldboy (2013), and said, "Watch this film 100 times kid, you will be someone very important one day."The kid was Shōhei Imamura, and he grew up to become one of the best anime directors of all time.
I almost feel like the title is missing a comma: The Insect, Woman. Which is not to say that this film portrays weak, insignificant women or that it is misogynistic, but rather, that it compares the struggle of an individual woman against the masculine systems of the world as Sisyphean and small. Tome's struggle is fraught with setbacks, many outside of her control, and with men (and women) who use her, with misbelief in paternal comforts, and with repetition of mistakes not because she is stupid but because she has few options. But that is not the whole of the film. The film also captures Japan's 20th century history through the lens of a single person, showing how changes in the world do and don't affect her situation (mostly, things stay the same even as great changes come). It bounces abruptly between moments and scenes, giving a series of glimpses into Tome's life and the nation's history. Contexts change, but details remain, just as history rolls on but Japan retains its identity. Parallel to the story of a woman's struggle is the story of a poor woman's struggle. That is to say, it's as much about class as sex. Some might argue the sexual politics are incidental, but I feel if this story were about a man, it would be much, much different. The culmination of this is when Tome breastfeeds a dying man. Metaphorically, she is an impotent mother figure. Literally, she has been driven to desperate, uncomfortable, unthinkable measures. December count: 8/100.
Taking characters from the lowest strata of Japanese society and paralleling the protagonistic plight with the evolution of Japanese society from the 1910s to 50 years later spanning over three generations, Imamura constructs his most socially ambitious project where Japan is seen through malicious eyes, as a world consisting mainly on instinct, betrayal, tragedy and animalistic tendencies, as the film opens with the metaphor of an insect trying to climb a mountain of dirt.One thing must be understood before anybody constructs a judgment towards or against the film: given that Imamura's intention was to avoid what he called “the pattern of suffering and pathos", the film is split into two: 1) the melodramatic tragedy that destroys the character up to her breaking point, and 2) the ability that Tome develops to ADAPT. The former has been offered many times by many artists, while the latter is a stunt rarely pulled off before that broke the usual cliché of melodramas placing the female lead in a helpless victimized state. This bold cinematic move along with Imamura's quasi-documentary style with an episodic structure and freeze-frames that made time stop for chanted soliloquies to step in and allow for self-reflection, were definitive signals of the Nūberu Bāgu acquiring a stronger presence in cinema and a distinctive form from the rest of its New Wave international counterparts.And it is in this way how the insect metaphor managed to be representative not only of Tome's gender, but also of its stratum and life conditions. But it also refers to an insect's ability to adapt, no matter how many times it is stepped on and killed. This review in no way attempts to minimize the dramatic effectiveness or thematic relevance of the abuse against women in an opportunistic society where things must end in tragedy or sad notes: many respectable auteurs like Naruse and Mizoguchi did this in their stories, but Imamura seems to suggest through Tome's character, amazingly played by Sachiko Hidari, that a potential response to this animalistic world is adaptation driven through personal convenience. That means, think about yourself, and put the rest in a second plain.Granted, the film's multiple layers form a final product hardly accessible to the mainstream viewer, especially when neither the technical nor the storytelling execution aim at creating personal involvement or emotional empathy. Basically, watching the film mirrors the experience of watching an insect program at Discovery Channel: a) we watch it out of curiosity, b) there is no empathetic feeling from us towards the survival struggle of the bugs that are about to be devoured, and c) there is no emotional investment. People normally look for exactly the opposite of those three points in movies, but there is no holy book describing the aspects of what constitutes a good film. Maybe one of the subliminal intentions of this unique piece of constructed drama was also to teach us how to adapt to alternative ways of cinematic storytelling.93/100
Der Film zeichnet fünfundvierzig Jahre im Leben von Tome nach, einer widerstandsfähigen Frau, die 1918 in ländlicher Armut geboren wurde und darum kämpft, in einer harten, von Männern dominierten japanischen Gesellschaft zu überleben.
Regie führte der japanische Regisseur Shōhei Imamura im Jahr 1963. Er ist eine Schlüsselfigur der japanischen Nouvelle Vague, bekannt für sein tiefes anthropologisches Interesse am menschlichen Instinkt und Überleben.
Sachiko Hidari gewann bei den 14. Internationalen Filmfestspielen Berlin den Silbernen Bären für die beste Schauspielerin für ihre Hauptrolle in dem Film.
