Director: Shoei Imamura
"I want to make messy, really human, Japanese, unsettling films" Shohei Imamura
Japanese director Shoei Imamura is one of the few directors in the world who has been making films for five decades. Now, at 72, he claims Dr Akagi will be his last film, which is too bad since he still makes films with the same vitality and originality as when he was younger.
His films have always had a slightly whacked-out mentality that judiciously blends absurdity, humanity, humor and horror. He’s also has never shied away from presenting characters that can be categorized as anti-heroes. As in almost all his films this one has a gleeful irreverent tone filled with a wide range of sexually depraved, outlandish drug-abusing or just plain odd characters.
The main character, Dr Akagi (Akira Emoto), is something different: a totally unselfish character who dedicates himself to those in need. He is one of Imamura’s truest heroes, a family doctor on a Japanese seaside coastal village who is on a steadfast crusade to eradicate hepatitis. The time is 1945 (a couple months before the dropping of the Atomic bomb) and Dr Akagi is continually on a mad dash between villages diagnosing and curing as many people as he can from the dreaded liver disease.
When we first see him he is running through a colorful agrarian landscape where he stops for a few seconds to rest. He sits down, pulls a large vegetable out of the ground, takes a bite and resumes running to his next house call. His manifesto is “Being a family doctor is all legs. If one leg is broken, he’ll run on the other. If two legs are broken, he’ll run on his hands.” There is a farcical quality to his daily house call routine: rather than greet the people he passes on the street he checks their throat and pulse and tells them to visit his office next week. Then he hurriedly rushes off to his next appointment.
Oddball characters, funny situations and soap opera dilemmas are introduced through each of Dr Akagi’s visits, but his nonjudgmental, fly-on-the-wall mentality is oblivious to the his bigger objectives. In his quest to find a cure for hepatitis, he gets assistance from unlikely sources. He takes on a young nurse who is known as the village prostitute, solicits help from a morphine addicted surgeon, a drunken Buddhist monk and an escaped Dutch war prisoner. In this way his dedication goes over and above the war. He justifies this by telling his nurse, “up there bombs, down here hepatitis.”
As the quote I've alluded to says Imamura likes to make 'messy' films and he exhibits this through his talent for both visual design and narrative sophistication. Every frame is filled with movement and clutter adding to the madness of the period. It’s easy to get lost in the many subplots, which at first seem unrelated, but in the hands of Imamura it’s fun to watch as he effortlessly ties every plot line together. Besides, the confusion adds a refreshing challenge since it eschews the predictability of the usual Hollywood film.
Imamura, never one to renege on his reputation for dark comedies, ultimately throws in a surrealistic zany ending that is pitched on a perfectly ironic note somewhere between harrowing and black.
Matt Langdon
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