Intentions of Murder is a hard film for me to write about, at least at this early stage of assimilation as to what Shohei Imamura is trying to say here. Let me be clear, I've watched the film all the way through, twice. And I think that, if I took sufficient time to spell out all the details, I could provide a reasonably insightful synopsis of the major events and most significant themes that are sounded in this long, dense and profoundly emotive work of art. So the difficulty I face is not, as I see it, due to a lack of comprehension. It's more due to the daunting gravity that Imamura attaches to his characters, specifically the simple and earthy woman, a survivor of horrendous sexual and psychological abuse, on the one hand quite naive and impulse-driven but on the other, intuitively wise and perceptive, whose pulsating life force beats as the heart of this perplexing melodrama. I find myself feeling rather stumped as to where I should go with this review. I've read several on the web just now that bleat on in exhaustive detail, trying to unpack its message in essays that, candidly speaking, just wear me out and seem fairly misguided in their fine-tuned analysis. Maybe it's just my mood - lord knows that I've been known to go on and on and on at times myself in covering movies that excite my critical and reflective instincts. But I'm just not sure that a meticulous sifting of Intentions of Murder is in either my or my readers' best interests. Thus, I'm going to keep it brief, since I have some travel plans this weekend and I don't want to put off writing this entry any longer.
So here's the gist of it: Sadako, a lower-class, homely, overweight (by Japanese standards) and generally undistinguished woman, functions as a sexually submissive servant in the household of Riichi, a cold and dismissive man who puts up with her as a domestic partner though he won't honor her with the status of being his wife. Originally hired as a maid, she's now charged with raising his son from a previous relationship, yielding to his random demands for erotic gratification, attending to his medical needs (mostly crude nebulizer treatments to relieve his asthmatic symptoms) and of course the usual cleaning and cooking duties that are taken for granted, no questions asked. Beyond all this, Sadako has to endure the scorn of Riichi's mother, who reinforces all the messages of shame and condemnation that she's already no doubt internalized over the course of her life, but needs to hear every so often just to keep the humiliation fresh in her mind.
One evening, while Riichi is away on business, Sadako's small, cramped home is invaded by Hiraoka, a crazed assailant who follows her from a train station after he realizes that she's just seen off her male companion and protector and is returning to her dwelling place alone. He's looking for money to pay for heart medications that he needs in order to keep himself alive. After pilfering a small amount of cash on hand, he yields to the next impulse, seizing the opportunity to rape Sadako. She resists to the extent that she can, but he's armed with a large and undeniably lethal butcher knife. As she has undoubtedly already done in various ways throughout her life, Sadako calculates the odds, recognizes that resistance to the patriarchal privileges of abuse and oppression is futile, and yields passively to the assault. Hiraoka completes the act, and slips away quietly into the night.
This severe disruption injects an unexpected note of dissonance between Sadako and Riichi, but neither he nor she overtly address the change that's occurred. She understands that tradition would dictate her obligation to commit suicide in the aftermath of her shame, but her appetites for food, for life, for whatever experiences she has yet to experience, prevent her from following through on that custom. Riichi senses that something is amiss, some kind of disturbance has occurred, but he remains too blind and obdurate to seriously engage Sadako in dialogue to the point that she'd open up and tell him what's going on. Still, Sadako's routine has been shattered by Hiraoka's invasion, and when the intruder comes back to violate her again, a weird emotional bond is formed between the two of them. On the surface, it's hideous, incongruent, almost offensive to even consider since it goes entirely against the response we'd naturally expect between a victim of blind, cruel and random assault and the man who raped her. Their connection never amounts to anything that I would recognize as "love" - but then, it's hard for me to judge or critique either of them for whatever confusion of feelings might have developed, since I don't think I've ever known the same depths of emotional poverty that characters like them may have experienced in the course of their lives. This bizarre dynamic, of an abused and traumatized woman who somehow embarks on a course of psychic and sexual liberation through pursuit of a relationship with her sick, manipulative violator, certainly provides ample material to offend and confound many viewers. But the strange thing to me is that Imamura's handling never felt exploitative or crassly sensationalistic to me. Perhaps I was just enamored with the sublime artistry of his compositions and the persistently unanticipated plot twists that kept me in a state of low-key astonishment, my brow continuously knotted up as I tracked Sadako's tumultuous journey to some approximation of self-realized equilibrium with her appalling fate.
It turns out that Hiraoka has an uncanny instinct for finding Sadako in moments where she's alone and vulnerable. Before we chalk this up to some kind of deus ex machina cinematic convenience on Imamura's part, let's take a moment to reflect on the fact that such creepy and traumatic liaisons take place just this way, all too often. I've heard enough about this kind of thing after nearly twenty-five years in social work to understand that the scriptwriters really weren't glossing much in crafting a scene like this:
Despite her ignominious origins and the apparent banality of her very existence - by all accounts of traditional Japanese values, as the illegitimate daughter of a whore, she's little more than a detestable, unfortunate mistake who can never fully redeem herself enough to make up for the desecration that she represents - Sadako turns out to be as fully possessed of all the survival instincts and inherent adaptability of the bravest samurai warrior or shrewdly calculating aristocrat, who each conduct their battles in arenas more hallowed by tradition and so broadly celebrated in Japanese cinema, according to traditional disciplines more loftily refined and sublime. By turning his masterful eye for visual composition, the evocative employment of heavy-laden metaphors (trains, mice, silkworms, physical frailties of various sorts), and most famously, his fearlessly subversive wit and rebelliousness in the direction of a feisty though abhorrent heroine with absolutely nothing left to lose, Shohei Imamura does his society (and every culture blighted by the ghosts of unresolved patriarchy) a service, though he seems intent at the moment on disemboweling it with savage ferocity.
Next: Band of Outsiders
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