My Five Year Plan

Vengeance is Mine is Shohei Imamura’s darkly comic melodrama about the true-life rise and fall of Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata), a serial killer of the early 1960s. It was Imamura’s first feature narrative in a decade and would seem a bridge between the two strands that had united his work to that point - an interest in ‘messy’ encapsulations of the Japanese disenfranchised - “the connection between the lower half of the body and the lower half of the social structure” - and a strong interest in the categorically real. In the previous decade, Imamura’s work had been confined to documentary portraits of a nation in change, and this was his grand return to public and critical graces. In fact, the film was received rapturously, winning the Japanese equivalent of the Academy Award and prefiguring his 80s renaissance that culminated in the awarding of the Palme D’Or to The Ballad of Narayama.

Brooklyn Academy of Music recently did a one-week run of the film as part of their Imamura series, and I had the good fortune of catching this miraculously colorful widescreen film on the big screen in a glorious, almost unimpeachable 35mm print from Janus Films. I’m going to make it a point to catch as many of the Imamura’s (at least the major works) as possible - seeing them up on the bigscreen, as this screening and my next (I’ll be writing about Pigs and Battleships either later today or tomorrow) gave me a strong appreciation for the incredible talent with which Imamura filled his frame, creating some nearly overwhelming visual experiences.

As for the film: There’s a matter-of-factness to the proceedings, a forceful insistence on presenting, in thoroughly unglamorized terms, the facts of the case, and yet there’s also a grand guignol comedy to it. Scenes drag on without regard for structure, and characters who at first seem pitiful grow increasingly aggravating. Imamura doesn’t let anyone off the hook, and in this regard, the closest comparison I have to the film is Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers. The killings - violent, yes, but not sensationalized through the use of abstract camera angles and moves, presented in a more reserved manner than anything else in the film. Most are kept entirely off-screen (but seeing one character bashed over the head repeatedly with a tack hammer made me squirm in my chair - as many can attest, I have ‘blunt head trauma’ issues when watching movies.)

Though this film is on a significantly larger scale than Kastle’s, with its claustrophobic interiors and purposefully restricted cast of misfits, they bear a lot of similarities in their formal approaches - the controlled chaos of Vengeance is Mine and the indecorous artificiality of The Honeymoon Killers are cousins to one another. In fact, Imamura himself was concerned theoretically with an understanding in his audience of the artificiality of the text, as he expressed in numerous interviews. And though I prefer the cruel minimalism of Kastle’s film, Vengeance is Mine is the more obviously virtuoso work, and rightfully considered a small masterpiece.