Spiritual Torment Tour

Watching "The Eel" in the afternoon, this movie is so fucking boring, even I, who watch boring movies in my life, don't understand why this movie can be favored by Cannes. The story of the movie is roughly that a man who goes fishing every night inexplicably receives a letter saying that every time he goes fishing, his wife will have a tryst with a man. After reading the letter, he was dubious, and one day he went home early, but he didn't expect to actually see his wife having sex with another man on the bed. At a glance, he was wicked and timid, and he picked up the kitchen knife and killed his naked wife. Then, covered in blood, he turned himself in with the murder weapon, and was released on bail after serving eight years in prison. He kept an eel as a pet in prison, and took it with him when he was released from prison. Because he learned the craft of barbering while in prison, he later opened a small barber shop to make a living. He maintained the habit of going fishing every night, and saved a woman who committed suicide by the river. Later, the woman named Hattori became his right-hand man in the shop and lived with him. Of course, that woman also has many stories, such as her coquettish old mother fell in love with her boyfriend and gave him a lot of money; she was pregnant with her boyfriend's child, but her boyfriend abandoned her and so on. The incomprehension of the theme of the film continued until the end of the film. The sentence that the inmate who tried to rape the heroine and knew about the hero's past was about to be submerged by the river: Actually, you didn't receive any letters at all, it was just for your sake. Just an excuse to hide your jealousy...because you've never had sex with a woman other than your wife...and the river drowned that man.
I think this detail is very important, because it brings an otherwise ordinary movie into an atmosphere of "uncertainty", and this tortured "uncertainty" is precisely the most popular cultural element at the moment. However, there are many contradictions in the film itself. For example, the male protagonist brutally killed his wife, and was very calm when faced with the blood stained his hands, but after he was released from prison, he went fishing with his friends, but was heartbroken to see the bloody eel injured by the harpoon, and then three Fan Twice secretly released the eel that had been caught. These plots make me full of doubts, people are more important or fish are more important?
When I hesitated before this question, I suddenly realized that both man and fish are just forms. The theme of the film should be the change of man's attitude in the face of "jealousy", or the redemption of man's inner devil. and beyond.
From the film's point of view, emotion is the most important thing to accomplish self-redemption. The male protagonist in the prison has nowhere to resolve his inner hesitation and anguish, and the eel has become his only object of confidence. In addition, he later learned that eels have to go through hardships every year to swim near the equator to spawn and mate, and then swim back to Japanese waters with small fish. This journey is extremely dangerous, and there are always thousands of eels dying to protect the small fish, and the eel is not sure whether the small fish it gave up its life to protect along the way is its own flesh and blood, even so, they still continue to accept it. Such a brutal test. At the same time, Miss Hattori, who worked with him, also established a deep relationship with him. These things were intertwined with the bloody words of the inmate, like a dose of chemicals acting on the hero's mentality and emotions, and finally let him The male protagonist was able to face jealousy, the devil who had driven him crazy, with a normal attitude. Later, although he was imprisoned again for beating up Miss Belly's bastard ex-boyfriend, what awaited him was no longer suffering and hesitation, but Miss Hattori's love and the child in her belly who no longer made the hero jealous.
The story told by this film is actually quite simple, but before the "uncertainty" factor mentioned above, the theme of the film is a bit confusing. It wasn't until "uncertainty" shattered the hero's other excuses for killing his wife that people realized that the hero was actually wrestling with the devil in his heart all the time. "Self-salvation" is actually a very cheesy thing, but I found that Imamura's best skill is always to use his skill to bring rotten themes back to life, and this time he obviously used "mental torture".

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