Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

Directed by Imamura Shohei ( Ballad of Narayama, Black Rain, The Pornographers), adapted from the novel Yami Ni Hirameku (Sparkles in the Dark) by Yoshimura Akira, the 1997 Japanese movie Unagi/"The Eel" is quirky. It is, however, nowhere near to being as perverse as Oshima Nagisa's "In the Realm of the Senses," although, like it, "Unagi" hinges on a "crime of passion."

Tipped off by an anonymous letter, Tokyo salaryman (in a flour company) Yamashita (Yakusho Kôji [Shall We Dance?]) finds his wife passionately responding to another man when he returns early from his weekly Friday night fishing foray. He (very graphically) stabs her to death. Covered with blood, he dutifully bicycles to the police station to confess. He becomes a model prisoner, internalizing all the rules, learning to be a barber, and keeping a pet eel in the prison pond.

When he is released (physically released), he takes the eel and sets up a barber shop in the middle of nowhere (seemingly at the end of a road on the seacoast with no immediate neighbors). On the side of the road he discovers the unconscious body of a Tokyo woman who was trying to kill herself (with pills). After her stomach is pumped, Hatter Seiko (Shimizu Misa [Okogé]) stays with the Buddhist priest (Fujio Tsuneta)who is Yamashita's parole officer. After she insinuates herself into working at the barber shop, it becomes a success.

Afraid of himself (specifically that love will lead to infidelity and murder again) Yamashita resists her advances, and prefers his eel (which never tells him what he doesn't want to hear and always listens to what he says... and never takes up with another man, or even with another eel, alone in his aquarium). He says he has had his fill with women, and prefers his eel.

Both Yamashita's and Keiko's pasts comes back to harass them: the love story between a man and his eel turns neo-noir—a quite effective noir plot, in fact (with some of the droll comedy one associates with yakusa violence in movies of Takahashi Kitano). There is also a very shy local man (Kobayashi Ken) who is trying to draw a UFO to land, borrowing the barber pole at night in a landing field he has cleared. And a sinister garbage man, Takasaki (Emoto Akira), and a geriatric Carmen (Keiko's demented mother played by Ichihara Etsuko).

Despite its bleak setting, damaged psyches, and outbreaks of violence, the movie has a lot of wry comedy (and some surrealistic dreams). It shows great compassion for an unusual mix of characters and ends hopefully. (I do not think that the main arc of Yamashita's engagement with the world gets lost in the various comic touches and enjoyed the unrushed way the stories unfold. It felt rich "thoughtful" rather than "slow-paced" to me.)

The viewer also learns about the life cycle of eels (traveling 2000 km to breed with many dying on the way back to the mud of Japan). The extent to which eels' life is a symbol or metaphor I will not opine about (beyond appropriating from their habitat for my title anyway...) though I recall that in "The Pornographers" there was a large goldfish in an aquarium the owner of which believed the fish was the reincarnation of a dead spouse. (The star of "The Pornographers," Ozawa Shoichi, has a cameo in "Unagi" as a physician, BTW.)

The New Yorker DVD has a satisfactory visual and aural transfer, but no bonus features (I don't consider optional subtitles and indexing "bonuses" but bare bones.)

Shigeru Komatsubara's cinematography is varied in palette, but never less than superb. (Shigeru has also show Imamura's two subsequent films, "Kanzo sensei" (1998) and Warm Water Under a Red Bridge (2001, also starring Yakusho Kôji), neither of which I have seen.)

The movie won the Palme D’or at Cannes and many Japan Academy Awards, including best director (Imamura) and best actor (Yakusho). (Miyazaki's anime "Princess Mononoke" won "best picture" and Kimura Daisaku won the cinematography award for "Yukai" (Abduction), which is unavailable here for comparison and second-guessing.)

If I had reviewed the movie immediately after watching it, I would have rated it 4 stars, but I lost the file with my notes for a review and thinking back a few weeks later it seems even better to me than it did while I was watching it. (4.5 stars)




Recommended: Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Suitability For Children: Not suitable for Children of any age