Subu Ogata is an underground director of pornographic films. He entered a relationship out of convenience with his landlord, the widowed Haru, a hairdresser who has a teenage son, Koichi, and teenage daughter, Keiko. Haru also believes a carp is her reincarnated husband, so she keeps the fish in a small aquarium in her house. Subu has troubles with his semi-illegal business, so he sometimes gets arrested by the police, the yakuza raid his studio whereas there are also money problems. Here and there, Subu also sells aphrodisiacs to clients. Koichi takes Subu's money and leaves; Keiko decides to become a prostitute after Subu rejected her advances; Subu's associate robs his equipment and flees. When Haru loses her mind and dies, Subu loses his potency and slowly loses his mind, as well. Subu decides to build a sex-doll as a surogate for a perfect woman, and rejects an offer from a businessman to sell it to him. As the rope holding his boat-house loosens, Subu drifts away in it in the sea.
Shohei Imamura's breakthrough film which encompassed many themes he is fascinated with (suppressed passion in society which gives people that raw energy and makes them more "alive"; the life of the "lower" class; peculiar habits of Japan; the search for happiness outside of norms; hedonism as the meaning of life), "The Pornographers" is a flawed, but still very good satirical drama which, despite its black and white cinematography, seems remarkably modern today—such taboo topics as the life of a pornographic filmmaker or the erotic fantasies of his clients seem as if they were filmed from contemporary Japan, and not Japan from 1966. The overall tone is too conservative and timid compared to the topics it is touching upon, probably due to the censorship in Japan of the day, and thus not a single scene of direct sex is shown, but only implied (such as Haru's and Subu's close up faces when they are kissing in bed), instead only showing the film crew watching their porn movie off screen in the screening room.
Only one sequence is dedicated to Subu actually directing a porn movie (he takes his daughter's school uniform to give it to some actress in his film, because his client ordered a movie of a doctor having sex with a school girl, but the actress is mentally retarded and the actor turns out to be her dad, who calms her by giving her a lollipop, and thus Subu stops the filming). Some dialogues are sizzlingly raw and 'rough' ("That's what animals do, not human beings!" - "We all want to leave the human race. We want to be free. Only society's taboos prevent us."), whereas the storyline plays with the incest elements in a symmetry (the teenage son Koichi has a secret Oedipus complex crush on his mother Haru, just as Subu has a subconscious desire towards his adoptive teenage daughter Keiko), showing how weird and dysfunctional families can be. Imamura displays his thoughts on the consequences of capitalism on Japanese society, creating a new form of sexuality for money or for hire (Subu rents a slim woman who recently gave birth to play a virgin because a rich old man always wanted to have sex with a virgin), which alienates people from each other more and more—this goes full way in the ending where Subu decides to make a sex-puppet, completely losing his human connection with women. With a running time of 127 minutes, "The Pornographers" are overlong and overstretched at moments, and several elments are unnecessary, yet it has some vivid energy that gives it some untypical viewing fascination.
Grade:+++
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