The Eel (1997) is a quirky oddball comedy that opens with a viciously bloody and brutal murder. Yamashita, white-collar worker, has received a letter that his wife is having an affair on the days he goes off for all-night fishing. He comes back one night early, finds it’s true, and stabs her to death.
Buy The Eel Blu-rayIt’s a vicious on-screen murder, with blood literally spattering the camera. We see her dying body, with large knife wounds on her bare breasts, one going all the way through to leave an exit wound out her back. This accomplished, Yamashita, covered in blood, bikes down to the local police station to turn himself in.
Eight years later, he’s out on parole. His parole officer, a bald, mustachioed Buddhist priest, takes him to his sleepy little town where Yamashita is going to revive a long defunct barbershop. It’s out of the way, and the out-of-the-way characters of the town find their way there, to maybe make a new friend.
Yamashita does not want friends. He barely wants customers. He wants to cut hair and talk to his eel. The Eel from the title is a pet he kept in prison that the guards helpfully sneak out for him. It’s the only thing he’s been talking to for years, because “It doesn’t say what I don’t want to hear.”
He’s doing okay being on his own until he discovers a woman in a field, conked out with an empty container of sleeping pills nearby. At first, he doesn’t report it. Any trouble can get him back in prison. But eventually, he gets the friends he doesn’t want to come with him, and they save the girl’s life.
That should be that, but instead of going away, the girl comes to work in his shop. And, because this is a movie, comes to fall in love with the gruff, unreadable, never friendly Yamashita.
I’ve spent a long time describing the events of this film because it doesn’t fit into a conventional narrative. It’s kind of the story of a curmudgeon coming out of his shell… but by the end of the movie, it’s not clear that that’s happened. It might be about a criminal who’s reformed… but it’s made clear Yamashita doesn’t have any remorse about what he did to his wife.
He’s surrounded by “oddball” characters. There’s the kid who wants to borrow the barber pole to attract UFOs. The fisherman widower who doesn’t quite know why Yamashita doesn’t want to eat his eel. There’s the low-level Yakuza (you can tell because this is the ’90s and they cast Show Aikawa, who always played Yakuza) who wants Yamashita to join in with his lawless fun. All of the oddballs gravitate towards the new oddball and want to include him in their misfit world. It’s oddly sweet.
Yamashita only wants to be left alone, but it’s not clear how much of his story matches reality. He sometimes talks directly to his eel, sometimes only in his mind. And sometimes scenes are not clear if they’re actually happening or only playing out in his fevered brainscans. He might not have actually gotten the letter he read in the opening scenes – very little is clear.
This is an old-style Japanese movie. It’s directed by an old anarchist filmmaker, Shohei Imamura, who was an early AD for the grandmaster Yasujiro Ozu. The Eel will never tell you what you’re supposed to feel, think, or believe about the characters. They exist, engage in their actions, and you have to decide what it all means.
Imamura’s films tend to have an earthiness and directness to them. That includes some horrific violence, and rather graphic sex. Yamashita watches his wife being plowed vigorously by her lover before he ends it with a knife. There’s also an attempted rape scene. A former fellow inmate of Yamashita’s attacks Keiko with incredible vigor. Though she resists, it’s deeply uncomfortable.
Which raises the question of who the audience for this film is? That’s not easy to answer, nearly 30 years after its release, when it won the Palme D’or and was virtually ignored in its home country. This is a sort of film that does not easily sit in any genre. It’s funny (mildly) and quirky, but while the sex and violence are not extremely prevalent, when they happen, they are extreme.
The sad truth might be that the audience for The Eel is arthouse-cinema fans from the ’90s. And we’re getting old. It’s the sort of film that expects patience and interest from the audience from the get-go because it only fully reveals itself as it finishes. And there’s no easy answers at the end of the film. Are all these kooky characters going to join together to help Yamashita in the end?
Maybe, but he might not even notice. This is an odd character study of an odd man in an odd world. It’s beautifully filmed, with a deliberate contrast of static and controlled motion shots. Some entire scenes take place without any cuts or camera motion, just an observer watching this odd world play out.
The eel itself is clearly a symbol, but what it means shifts as Yamashita learns his place in the world, and about eels themselves. He thinks the eel is him. Turns out, it’s an eel.
The Eel has been released on Blu-ray by Radiance. The Blu-ray disc contains two cuts of the film, the original theatrical release and a director’s cut, which is about 17 minutes longer. Other extras on the disc include “Tony Rayns interview” (28 min); “Daisuke Tengan interview” (19 min), an interview with the film’s co-writer and the director’s son; “1997: A Year to Remember”, (14 min) a visual essay about an epochal year for Japanese cinema; and a trailer.
