The Pornographers - Criterion Collection
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Features
• Anamorphic
• Black & White
• DVD-Video
• Subtitled
• Widescreen
• NTSC
In Theaters : August, 1966
DVD Release : 05 August, 2003 |
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The Pornographers - Criterion Collection Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
A queasy tale of degradation, evokes gloomy thoughts.
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Just describing the story of any one of Shohei Imamura's films won't be enough to convey its oddity. Imamura's films are the misfits of Japanese cinema. They deal with bizarre, marginal characters in grotesque and unusual situations. Don't expect Kurosawa's epic sweep or Ozu's understatement. Imamura's films are flamboyantly crude and bizarre. His closest analogue in Japanese literature might be Kenzaburo Oe -- Oe's short story collection Teach Us To Outgrow Our Madness has a very similar tone. (And Imamura's more recent film Warm Water Under A Red Bridge is nicer than his early work, much like Oe's A Quiet Life.)
This film is about a frumpy middle-aged man named Subu who makes money by filming and selling illegal pornography. But he runs a small operation, which makes him vulnerable to just about everything. He needs to conceal his work from larger, more organized gangs, so they don't extort money from him. But of course, his work is illegal, so he can't exactly ask the law for help, either.
It's a sleazy story. The film is not the least bit titillating -- the actual pornography is never shown. Most of the plot is concerned with Subu running around trying to keep his operation afloat. He has to deal with lots of small details, like where to buy film, where to get women, how to sell the product without the mob knowing about it, and so on. It's such a mundane, slate-gray routine that it isn't even shocking.
One might be tempted to read the film as a justification of Subu -- not necessarily of Subu's work, but of Subu himself, an attempt to humanize him, in other words. Something along the lines of, "hey, this guy is engaged in illegal activities on the fringes of society, but after all he's just another poor hard-working slob, same as all of us." But I personally think that the film does precisely the opposite. And this is a bit of a subtle point, since Imamura does put a great deal of effort into making Subu as "ordinary" as possible. He's not involved with more "serious" crime, and he's not really any more malicious than the average person. And he doesn't take any prurient interest in his product -- his main reason for doing this work is to make enough money to support a family.
That family consists of a woman and her son and daughter, both children by another man. The children despise Subu from the beginning, but after they find out about his line of work, their hostility becomes open. At the same time, they continue to live on his money. They understand that he's supporting them, and this makes them hate him even more. There is a subplot in which Subu appears to feel desire for the daughter -- at the very least, he desperately wants her to like him. But the more he grovels before her, the more she humiliates him. She tells him to his face that she hates him, and at times, it seems like she's deliberately leading him on and raising his hopes, solely to extract money from him.
Subu has more luck with the woman, who really does seem to like him sometimes. But she feels guilty for coming to consort with such a man after her husband's death. She constantly imagines that her dead husband is angry at her, and fears some kind of divine retribution. Which ultimately arrives -- the final scene with her in the hospital is terrifying, because it's so jarring and unexpected.
This is why the film is not really a comedy, even a "black" one. It's just not funny to watch the man be degraded and used over and over and over by everyone and everything. He has no dignity. Even his appearance is vaguely repellent. There's something reptilian about the way Subu slinks around in his secret studio. And, of course, as a final humiliation, it turns out that he's impotent. He does miserable things and lives a miserable life. It might elicit some compassion on the part of the viewer, but even that compassion comes mixed with contempt. Subu makes several defiant speeches in defense of his vocation, but his words have a whinging, self-justifying tone that, while perhaps mildly humorous, is still distasteful.
And this is also why Subu emerges as an object of scorn rather than sympathy. It would seem that pornography has dehumanized him totally, beyond all hope. It perverts all his good intentions in advance. He wants to be a responsible father, but his "dirty money" makes the children hate him, and his very attempts to endear himself to them have the exact opposite effect. And so on, and so forth -- he took up this work to be happy, but it's the work itself, more than anything else, that forever condemns him to wretchedness.
I guess that's a really depressing message, so there's a drawn-out scene at the very end that is a little less intense (though still distasteful). The last shot has the effect of slightly softening the inevitable conclusion about Subu, by portraying him as a lost soul out in a vast ocean. But that's also why the whole scene seems unconvincing. The hospital scene writes off Subu's life, completely and finally; that's where his story really ends.
It's an engrossing film, in its own way. There are lots of oddities throughout, like how the woman imagines that her husband was reincarnated as a fish and is now watching her from his bowl across the room. But the overall tone is unpleasantly grotesque. I prefer Warm Water Under A Red Bridge -- at least there Imamura allowed his harried protagonist to regain his dignity. |
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The Pornographers - Criterion Collection dvd movie.