The Great Movies III

The film gathers fearful force. Ordinary human values have been set aside for all the major characters, and that is tested above all when the rich businessman rapes Haru, with Enokizu and the mother in the next room. Haru cries for help. Enokizu seems emotionless, fixates on a dripping faucet, tightens it, and then finally reaches for a knife-but the mother stops him. She does not want to lose the man's financial support.

When the film was released in 1979, it was sometimes called the Japanese In Cold Blood. Not at all. Richard Brooks's 1967 film offers motivations for the characters-greed in one, childhood wounds in another. It contains a famous line: "I thought Mr. Cutter was a very nice gentleman. I thought I so liked the old man. I thought so right up to the time I cut his throat."What is most disturbing about Enokizu is that he has no feelings at all about his victims. It is simply in his nature to kill.

Seeing Vengeance Is Mine soon after seeing Paul Schrader's Mishima again, I was reminded of the Japanese fascination with death. I stare into Enokizu's eyes, which are a blank slate, and imagine his thoughts. Does he have such contempt for life that he is killing innocent strangers simply to be hanged by the state? Maybe his victims also create ideas about him in their own minds. Certainly the girl Haru has been given no reason to believe he loves, likes, or even much notices her. He never says a single kind thing to her; indeed, he says as little as possible, speaking mostly in epigrams. Insectlike, she is drawn to the candle flame.

Imamura made another great film about death named Ballad ofNa-rayama, which won the Cannes Film Festival in 1983 (another of his films, The Eel, won in 1997). In Nayarama, a village traditionally determines that the time has come for an old person to die, and ceremoniously abandons him or her in the wilderness, even in winter. It is, curiously, a life-affirming film, lacking the rage of Vengeance Is Mine, but sharing its absorption in death. The Eel is about a barber who finds his wife with her lover and stabs them both to death. Released on parole, he begins a new life shadowed always by the awareness that he may kill again.

As a stylist, Imamura is a master of unobtrusive camera strategies. His POV is sometimes a little above eye level, which has the effect of diminishing his characters, presenting them perhaps as entomological specimens. In other shots, he will use low angles to include backgrounds in deep focus, as in the scene where Enokizu smolders in the kitchen while Haru is raped; the dripping faucet is placed and lighted to draw his, and our, attention. During the murders, his camera holds a middle distance, not moving, once looking straight down. He does not indulge in shock cuts or quick moves; he regards objectively. You can no more attribute motives to him in this film than to his subject.

On the DVD, there is an interview with Imamura, some years later. It is utterly unhelpful and unrevealing, and for that reason fascinating. What does he think of Enokizu? He will not say.

t is hard to say how much of Richard Linklater's Waking Life (zoos) is a dream. I think all of it is. His hero keeps dreaming that he has awakened. He climbs out of bed, splashes water on his face, walks outside, and finds himself dreaming again. But the film isn't one of those surrealist fantasies with pinwheels coming out of the hero's eyes or people being sucked down into the vortex. It's mostly conversational, and the conversation is all intriguing; the dreamer must be intelligent.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps he's channeling it from outside. A woman in a coffee shop tells him her idea for a soap-opera plot, and he asks her how it feels to be a character in his dream. She doesn't answer, because how can she, since she's only a character in his dream? On the other hand, where did she come up with that plot? He tells her he could never have invented it himself. It's like it came to him in a ... no, that doesn't work. It's like it came in from outside the dream.

And what is dreaming, anyway? A woman in the film speculates that when we dream, we are experiencing ourselves apart from our physical bodies. After we die, she says, doesn't it make sense that we would keep on dreaming, but that we'd never stop dreaming because now we were apart from our bodies? No, it doesn't make sense, I think, because our dreams take place within our physical brains. Maybe not. Maybe we only think they do.