Overview: After serving time in prison for murdering his unfaithful wife, Yamashita (Koji Yakusho, Perfect Days, Cure) is released on parole, accompanied only by his pet eel.

Hoping to stay out of trouble, he takes over a rural barber shop that quickly becomes a gathering point for the eccentric locals. However, the discovery of a woman’s failed suicide starts a chain reaction that brings back past demons - and not just his own.

The Eel won master filmmaker Shohei Imamura his second Palme d’Or, after 1983’s The Ballad of Narayama and was the breakthrough of its star Yakusho.

Blu-ray Verdict: Somewhat of a cinematic oddity, if anything, THE EEL immediately grabs your attention as Shōhei Imamura’s calling cards are all over the film’s opening scenes: mysterious letters, illicit sex, a brutal knife murder, and an unlikely friendship with an animal!

As a whole though, Shohei Imamura’s Palme D’Or winner is a deceptively engaging slice of humanist melodrama, stuffed full of warmth yet with just enough humorous bite to give it a strange little edge.

Cure’s Koji Yakusho is jailed for the brutal murder of his wife, whom he discovers having an affair while he engages in regular all night fishing trips. After eight years inside, he’s released into the custody of his caring parole officer and after buying a run-down little barber shop in the middle of nowhere, slow begins to create a life for himself…until he discovers the unconscious body of a young woman (Misa Shimizu) who has attempted suicide.

As part of her rehabilitation, she comes to work in Yakusho’s barbers, keeping him and hit pet eel (the only living thing he talks to as it never says anything he doesn’t want to hear in return) company. But demons from the past won’t let either of them lie and as events spiral out of control, Yakusho has a decision to make – stay out of the kind of trouble his parole officer would warn him would lead him straight back to prison? Or re-engage with humanity and the world and finally begin to live again.

As aforementioned, there’s a bizarre mood to Imamura’s film – the opening murder is insanely brutal and thanks to Yakusho’s incredibly repressed performance for most of the film, it feels like the audience is being asked to sympathize with an unrepentant killer; yet as Yakusho establishes his new life, Imamura packs the cast with the kind of bizarrely colorful characters that wouldn’t feel out of place in a Wes Anderson film.

A slick yuppy who spends all of his time in a rural barbers; a bluff fisherman who hates everyone but will do anything for his friends; and a young man convinced that all he needs to make contact with aliens is Yakusho’s barbershop pole – and it gives the film a strange quirky edge.

Yet the central relationship between Yakusho and Shimizu is gentle and touching, slowly thawing out both characters with enough of a story (involving her ex who owes millions, and her mother who owns millions but is succumbing to a neuro-degenerative disease) to see these two damaged individuals slowly begin to re-engage with each other and by extension themselves.

And it’s this bizarre atmosphere that stops the film from being truly exceptional – it attempts too much (and there’s even the addition of even more storylines, including a threat to reveal Yakusho’s past to his new circle of friends) and as such, each element feels like it never gets explored enough, Yakusho and Shimizu similarly never explored in any real depth outside of their immediate narrative devices…but then that’s life.

In closing, the film is endlessly fascinating thanks to its characters and its complex tapestry of esoteric beats, but equally frustrating at never letting us ‘in’ to any of them to truly satisfy<.p> Bonus Features:
Interview with critic Tony Rayns (2024)
Interview with screenwriter Daisuke Tengan (2024)
Visual essay by Tom Mes on the year 1997 as a turning point in Japanese cinema (2024)
Trailer
Newly improved English subtitle translation
Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Time Tomorrow
Limited edition booklet featuring a newly translated archival interview with Imamura

www.radiancefilms.co.uk