Judging from just about every review I've read, including the Criterion Collection's booklet essay included in the DVD, it seems almost obligatory, when writing about Shohei Imamura's breakthrough film Pigs and Battleships, to present him in stark contrast to the venerable Japanese director Yasujiro Ozu. That's largely owing to his experience working with Ozu upon first entering Japan's film industry, assisting him on a trio of important films of the early 1950s, including Early Summer and Tokyo Story. Despite their working relationship in that formative stage of Imamura's career, or more likely, in reaction to what that work produced and how it was received, Imamura went on to make films that mark a severe departure from the refined and elegant traditional Japanese style that Ozu epitomized. Imamura was far from alone in making provocative, iconoclastic Japanese films at this time - Nagisa Oshima, Seijun Suzuki, Koreyoshi Kurahara and others were quite busy pushing the limits of cinematic boundaries as well - but his influence and reputation continued to grow as the decade went on. Pigs and Battleships wasn't his first directorial effort, but it's the one that set his work apart from the pack, landing him in a bit of trouble with his employers at Nikkatsu Studio but confirming his determination to forge a path of presenting his vision of "cultural anthropology" on film.
So though I run the risk of sounding like an imitator, in my case, comparisons between Imamura and Ozu can hardly be avoided, since I first watched Pigs and Battleships a little over a week ago, hard on the heels of viewing Ozu's 1960 film Late Autumn. The two films sit in close succession on the time line of Criterion films I'm working through, and as deeply impressed as I was to see Ozu's mature artistry on display so near to the end of his career, I think watching such a disparate work from the same nation, released just a couple months later, benefited my viewing of each, helping me to better appreciate them both, but for drastically different reasons. Imamura certainly had a legitimate point in wanting to demonstrate that Japanese life in 1961 consisted of so much more than the quiet, deeply internalized and genteel relational dilemmas that preoccupied Ozu (and continue to make his films so interesting and accessible to many people who live outside of his time and social context.) While Ozu's work between the late 40s and early 60s does provide evidence of the growing affluence and increased stability of postwar Japan, there were huge issues that his aesthetic approach led him to avoid or at most to address with indirect glances. And one of them was the ongoing American military presence in some parts of Japan, such as the United States Fleet Activities base in Yokosuka, located just south of Tokyo. The site was first occupied by American forces in August 1945, just after Japan's surrender, and soon became a major naval outpost that remains under US control to this day. While the presence of foreign sailors and the impact they exert on the local community there provides the backdrop for Pigs and Battleships, Japanese citizens are Imamura's primary focus, and it turns out to be a raw, wildly funny but also unsettling and disturbing portrait of that society - despite the opening disclaimer that This Story is Entirely Fictional.
After a few establishing shots of the base accompanied by jarringly familiar "patriotic" sounding American music, we're plunged immediately into the sleazy little neighborhoods surrounding the outpost, where sailors take their shore leave maneuvering past the prying eyes of military police patrols and two-bit hustlers looking to get them drunk, hook them up with good-time girls and loosen up their wallets. Though Imamura wasn't intending to market his films outside his natural audience, seeing our men in uniform as viewed through Japanese eyes was pretty novel and illuminating for me, even if they were never really developed as full-fledged characters in the script. I couldn't help thinking about my dad, who was stationed in Japan as a young Marine corporal right around this time, just a few months before I was born, and probably witnessed (or participated!) in some of the shenanigans that went on around the base. To the Yokosuka locals, the American presence is just a source of fresh and readily available cash, an exploitable resource sitting there for the taking. And it's in this seedy milieu that we first meet Kinta, an aspiring hoodlum who's pledged himself to a local gang involved in supplying pork to the Americans, as well as other, more overtly corrupt shakedowns and petty turf wars. He's a cocky brat, running around town bare-chested with a silk jacket embroidered with "Japan" in English lettering on the back, dark aviator sunglasses and brandishing a sideways baseball cap. Too willing to ingratiate his way up the criminal ranks, he's the perfect patsy - young, dumb and impulsive enough to take on whatever crap assignment nobody else in the gang wants to handle themselves.
Kinta's got a girlfriend, Haruko, who works for her family's restaurant but dreams of something more stable and and honest, though not necessarily as lucrative. Her aspirations are for marriage and family, sustained by a solid factory job. They're both naive, just emerging from late adolescence, right on the cusp of making those young adult decisions that will steer their destinies almost irrevocably from that point forward, yet typically oblivious to the big picture and utterly at the mercy of their emotions and impulses of the moment. For Kinta, his desire to score points with the gangsters overrides Haruko's numerous appeals to straighten up his act and not become a stooge - but he sure has the hots for his gal, and amidst all the jostling, strutting and conflicts that unfold so rapidly throughout Pigs and Battleships, Imamura throws in enough scenes of tender, innocent infatuation to remind us just how deeply over their heads these two unfortunate young lovers really are.
The plot machinations of Pigs and Battleships are too intricate, or just plain confusing, to bother summarizing here, and the substance of the film doesn't require a viewer to closely follow each lurid transaction or dirty double-cross that propels the characters from one crisis to the next in order to assimilate Imamura's message. The impact comes from watching how Kinta and Haruko in particular respond to the hard blows of circumstance that hit them from all angles. They're both powerless peons at the bottom of Yokosuka's exploitative hierarchy. Kinta's asked to take the fall for his gang boss if a murder rap comes down after a rival is knocked off, and he overcomes his goggle-eyed revulsion at having to help dispose of the body with nervous pulls from the whiskey flask tossed his way. Strung along by his fellow gangsters as much for their amusement as for actually advancing their criminal enterprise, Kinta throws himself ever more recklessly into his outlaw persona with thuggish joviality, bashing merchandise, blustering threats to shop owners and tossing around money that's not his as he lives out his notion of what it means to be a big shot. But the reckless swagger he musters is belied by his kindhearted concern for neighbors less fortunate than him. What he surmises to be the harmless theft of a few young piglets gets him in trouble with one of his bosses, until that boss learns that the kid isn't so much a scammer out to rip off the gang as he's really just a kid with enough shreds of conscience intact that he's sincerely willing to help people he cares about for altruistic motives.
Haruko, for her part, loves her man more than she loves the promises of easy money and material luxury he likes to promise her. But she's not immune to the fascinations that emanate from Yokosuka's illicit pastimes, ultimately trying her hand at prostitution as an act of defiance against her disappointing boyfriend, her money-grubbing family and the stultifying conditions she's subjected to. Simultaneously scorning and emulating the example of her sister, the proverbial gold digger who's hooked up with a Japanese-American and contemplates moving with him to the USA, Haruko briefly sets aside her scruples and lets herself go wild, giving herself over for a night of "fun" with three drunk and horny Americans. In capturing the scene, Imamura's swirling overhead camera simulates the inescapable and nauseating vortex of confusion and dread that overtakes Haruko as she finds herself trapped in a situation way beyond her control. But there's no time for her to wallow in victimhood. The room stops spinning, she seizes a brash opportunity to get a small slice of revenge, which quickly blows up on her, leading to pursuit by raging sailors in underwear, a harsh smackdown and her arrest, ultimately snapping Haruko back to her senses as she realizes the futility of traveling further down that path of abandonment.
Beyond Imamura's frantic forays through a modern rendition of The Lower Depths, we're drawn into some ruminations on Japan's strained relationships with some of its Asian neighbors, as represented by Chinese and Korean racketeers all working their own angles in the pork game. The tensions probably have more resonance with viewers closer to that context than I am, but these scenes cast a dark ironic light on the quote that leads off this essay, read from a school textbook by Haruko's little brother in the aftermath of an ugly catfight between his older sisters. As his voice-over continues extolling Japan's cultural virtues, we see pigs in a crate being towed through the squalid streets of Yokosuka, contradicting all standing notions we may have about tranquil zen gardens, elegant calligraphy, cherry blossoms and meditative tea ceremonies as emblems of that great civilization. And if that gritty come-down isn't enough, there's this, the most memorable and defining sequence of Pigs and Battleships that works pretty well on its own simply for its outrageous visuals, even for those who don't really have any clue as to why the young man is brandishing a machine gun, shooting out the neon and ultimately turning his porcine cargo loose into Yokosuka's red light district:
But after that blazing climactic scene, in which Kinta's fate is tragically sealed, we still have to see how things wind up with Haruko, and her exit is indisputably the most noble and admirable gesture of the entire film, though it consists of nothing more than striding upstream against the current of a flock of addle-brained Japanese women streaming toward the docks waiting to greet a new arrival of American seamen. Haruko, recognizing that everything taking place within the confines of Yokosuka is saturated with the slime of raw exploitation, has nothing better to offer as her alternative than hopping the next train out of town. Rather than endure one more ripoff or pin her hopes to some foolish man waiting to either fall victim to a scam or be the victimizer himself, she takes a chance on self-determination. We don't know where that train will take her, or if the scene she lands in will be all that much different than what she left behind, qualitatively speaking. Unlike the pigs peddled by the gangs and eaten by the Yanks, Haruko recognizes what awaits her if she just sits still and lets herself be passively consumed. Her only alternative is to adopt the hardened exterior and the merciless determination so characteristic of the steel-clad battleships always looming in the background as they float unchallenged upon the waters of Tokyo Bay.
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