☆ ☆ ☆ ½
Pigs
and Battleships (1961) – S. Imamura
Imamura’s films are hard to predict;
from my limited exposure to him, it seems that he doesn’t use genre (or
formula) as a starting place for his films.
Pigs and Battleships was his first big hit and it is a savage comedic
look at a post-war Japanese seaside town located adjacent to an American naval
base (Yokosuka). We follow an odd gang
of chimpira (junior yakuza) who arrange a deal with a Japanese-American from
Hawaii to buy food scraps from the base to support a pig farm (since pork
prices are rising). The unlucky loser
among this bunch, Kinta, has a girlfriend who wishes to break away from the
town and its symbiotic relationship with the Americans. I say symbiotic instead of parasitic because
Imamura is clear that it is the Americans that are exploiting and corrupting
the Japanese (who may be willing participants, he suggests); in fact, the
Americans are uniformly treated as brutal lugs here, seen mostly in
brothels. Gradually the film focuses in
on Kinta and Haruko and their fate. We
hope they escape – but in an Imamura film, you never can be sure.
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