My Five Year Plan

Some titles hold hidden gold: combing through a hastily-compiled Top 20 at YMDb (the still-operational Your Movie Database site, which is extremely depressing), there are any number of titles on here that don’t quite live up to the films behind them: Metropolitan, Day of Wrath, Picnic at Hanging Rock. But what could live up to these masterpieces?

And then there are titles like Pigs and Battleships, or as it was even more provocatively subtitled on the beautiful print BAM showed on Friday and Saturday, Hogs and Warships. It would feel like a put-on - what could possibly live up to an evocatively violent title like that? - if the film didn’t deliver in such a potent way. More in keeping with Imamura’s traditional style than Vengeance is Mine, this film is violent, fast-paced, insanely over-the-top (though never verging on comic-book camp in the manner of the great Japanese genre filmmakers of the late 60s and thereafter - Gosha, Suzuki, Okamoto, Fukasaku, Yamaguchi) and an unbelievably fervent testimony to Japan’s frustrations with post-war American occupation. The film is a noir of sorts, with a deeply fatalistic quality that brings to mind the most bitter American noirs (Ace in the Hole, Scarlet Street) and a poetic realism and almost mystical coastal setting that for me evokes Le Jour Se Leve.

But don’t think there are any real similarities between these two films on either a narrative or formal level. With rapid, virtuosic camera moves and a compositional style that insists, unlike Carne’s hauntingly spare framings, on filling the wide-screen (and often very wide-angle) frame with as much information as possible. There are dialogue sequences that turn Ozu (under whom Imamura apprenticed) upside-down, with direct-address framings and graphic matches that are as startling as they are soothing in Ozu’s work.

The story is that of a low-level Yakuza hood (Hiroyuki Nagato) and his girlfriend (Jitsuko Yoshimura) caught up in a mess of intrigue in a small town overrun by the American Navy. There are about twenty plots here, but the most important ones deal with blackmarket hog sales and the peddling of flesh to the American occupiers. Man-as-animal, a common theme in Imamura’s work, is the key connection between these two stories, and so the film ends up a rebel cry against the perceived exploitation of the Japanese people by the American occupation.