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| Director Shôhei Imamura |
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| actor Shigeru Izumiya |
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| actress Kaori Momoi |
EIJANAIKA A- aka: Why Not? aka: What the Hell? Japan (151 mi) 1981 ‘Scope d: Shôhei Imamura
The world is cruel when it is changing.
The title translates to “What the hell?”, a masterful, unforgettable historical epic about the eijanaika riots in 1867, displaying a brief glimpse of people power in the Edo era as the Tokugawa Shogunate, a military dictatorship that ruled for more than 700 years, gave way to the Meiji Restoration, effectively ending the Shogunate’s 264-year feudal system, while doors to the West were just starting to crack open. Commodore Perry’s visit to Yokohama harbor a decade earlier helped destabilize a strict social order, opening doors of commerce, where mismanagement at local levels led to widespread corruption and criminality. Some of this was difficult to follow, as you couldn’t keep track of which side each character was on, perhaps intended to all be a blur, as local warlords and masterless samurai were battling the Emperor for control of the country, but most of this is told through ordinary people or those on the fringes of society, becoming an extremely compelling and cynical look at how both government and business collude with samurai soldiers and thugs, whoever is available, to protect their interests, while the underclasses scurry about trying not to be crushed by the changing vanguards of power. In this film, political loyalties and personal relationships disintegrate, as the only certainty is money, where money is power, but power is constantly shifting. The story follows Genji (Shigeru Izumiya, a rock ‘n’ roll singer), poor and rootless, who dreams of migrating to America where he can be a farmer and own his own land, yet he’s constantly besieged by his own confusion, among the more bewildering Japanese characters in cinema, while the same can be said for his more sexualized wife, Ine, played by Kaori Momoi, Hirohito’s wife in Sokurov’s THE SUN (2005), also appearing in Doris Dörrie’s Greetings from Fukushima (Grüsse aus Fukushima) (2016), who has become an alcoholic with a constantly changing mindset, routinely shifting her position, yet always remaining steadfastly loyal, despite all the sexual shenanigans she’s forced to endure, never really crawling out from the carnal world that engulfs her, remaining something of a puzzlement throughout, known for performing salacious sexual acts at a decadent street carnival owned by Kinzo (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi), a gangster boss who controls local criminal business interests. Everyone seems to be owned and controlled and manipulated by corrupt powers. Moral behavior, rules of a civilized society, are nowhere to be found. Absent is the refined, more controlled aristocratic Buddhist culture, which reveals what it means to be Japanese as seen through the eyes of Mizoguchi or Ozu, who mentored Imamura, working as the second assistant director on Tokyo Story (Tokyo Monogatari) (1953), yet the precise, regimented style did not suit him, with characters rendered completely powerless and artificial in this world, replaced by a Shinto spirit that is more magical, raw and primitive, revealing a lower class world of frenzied sexuality and irrepressible energy, driven by forces outside themselves to criminal behavior, and ultimately to a class revolution, spurring the open acts of rebellion and riots shown at the end of the film. While based on a historical reality, the Ee ja nai ka riots, Imamura’s vision is purely fictional, with no real interest in exploring what led to this condition, or why various factions are so distrustful and at odds with each other, growing delirious with near-hallucinogenic exaggeration, becoming a defiantly fatalistic protest expressing society running amok, creating a spectacular, bravura finale that far outweighs anything that precedes it, with “Eijanaika” becoming more of a projected state of mind, becoming an epic design of massive scale, and something not easily forgotten.
After a series of movies in the 50’s and 60’s, Imamura, a provocative filmmaker still relatively unknown outside Japan, spent the decade of the 70’s making documentaries for television, known for his sympathetic portrayals of the poor and socially outcast, expressing a deep interest in folklore and mythology, while displaying a deep distrust in societal authority, where the surface conceals the underlying forces of power, money, and sex. Becoming disillusioned how significantly the camera alters a documentary reality, he returned to feature filmmaking with VENGEANCE IS MINE (1979), a true story of a serial killer before making this film, written ten years earlier, his first period film and one that stares straight into the eye of his own nation’s history, without a hint of nostalgia for the past, or anything resembling a hero, questioning what really motivates a developing country, creating a sprawling, large-scale epic canvas and a unique historical film taking place in 1866, revealing the turmoil leading up to the Meiji Restoration, when the Tokugawa Shogunate was overthrown in favor of a 14-year old emperor. Unlike other revolutions sparked by uprisings of the lower classes, this was a shift of power from the top, from the positions of privilege, which included the samurai class. While poverty was widespread, inflation was rampant, causing social institutions to crumble into the economic and political chaos of the times, where criminal activity only escalated, with gangs controlling feudalistic criminal operations, then prosecuting those who those same officials persuaded to act in their behalf, making promises they can never keep, leaving behind a series of neverending casualties, some shown with extreme realism, leaving peasants impotent with rage, with the film literally exploding with movement and color, shot by cinematographer Shinsaku Himeda, exaggerated by a hyper-realistic emotional hysteria of abstract expressionism that guides the film. Getting underneath the serene nature of Japanese culture, Imamura exhibits a kind of disruptive cinema, with a swarm of characters dominating the screen, essentially an unconventional love story between Genji and Ine, both caught up by historical events, swallowed up into a lifetime of poverty. Ine’s family sells her to a carnival owner to stave off starvation after her husband Genji disappears in a shipwreck, a sign of the economic desperation of the times, with Ine becoming Kinzo’s mistress and starring performer in his sexual cavalcade of titillating interests known as Tickle the Goddess, where men take turns trying to blow a paper streamer between her legs, a metaphor for their sexual prowess, often left deflated. Strangely, she differentiates herself from the other women who work as prostitutes, preferring to think of herself as an artist, yet she’s caught between two worlds as well, a willing pawn to Kinzo’s sexual exploits, yet also a comic heroine in Genji’s continual misadventures. The assortment of weird and grotesquely surreal sideshow acts is baffling, creating discordant images, like the presence of a camel, an animal never before seen in Japan, being led by Arab handlers, shot with a claustrophobic lens, where viewers find themselves immersed in a throwback to the vulgarity and bawdiness of Chaucer’s Middle Ages The Canterbury Tales (I racconti di Canterbury) (1972), where nudity is on full display, conveying the confusion and instability of the era.
Genji was shipwrecked on his way to Yokohama, rescued by an American vessel, spending six years in America before returning back to Japan, where he immediately kisses the soil before being thrown into jail, suspected of being a Christian, eventually escaping where he discovers his long lost wife in a carnival show working in the sleazy quarters of the East Ryogoku district in Edo (present-day Tokyo), an area along the riverside rampant with pickpockets, beggars, prostitutes, dwarves, lady wrestlers, snake eaters, and slave traders, with Kinzo on the payroll of both the Shogunate and the Emperor, playing both sides against each other, with no distinguishable differences between either side, so it’s hard to say who is the controlling force, further complicating the myriad of plot twists. With Genji having no means of support, he goes to work for Ginzo, eventually buying back his wife, using his English language proficiency to act as a go-between with Americans, who are selling guns to both sides, and local gangsters, hoping to save enough money to return to America with his reluctant wife, evolving into bumbling slapstick ineptitude when he decides to become a thief. The fact that the United States is also the country helping to oppress the Japanese peasantry is one of the central ironies of the film, with the Shogunate replacing samurai swords with an infantry armed with shooting rifles sold by Americans. Much like a novel, there are detours and subpolots, with a multitude of characters introduced, much of which is difficult to follow, with suggestions that some crude edits may have chopped off some of these tangential storylines from an already lengthy film, including Furukawa (Ken Ogata), a samurai-for-hire who gets involved in some unethical assignments, used by the Shogunate as a hired killer, yet he also has a fatalistic death wish involving a double suicide with his blind mistress. A far cry from Kurosawa’s noble samurai and traditional Japanese insistence on dedication to the nation, it’s the corruption of the samurai class, in particular, that feels most ethically depraved, as their severe Buddhist training helped to shape their meticulous standards of conduct, so to see it undermined by gangsters with so little respect for human life reveals the extent of the deep-seeded societal corruption, where local Shogun clans are fiercely fighting to protect their feudal interests from the Imperial throne, with a nation already in a state of flux by opening doors to the West for the first time after 200 years of enforced isolation. This film shares a certain commonality with VENGEANCE IS MINE, as both share a similar vision of people as helpless pawns of society. For the poor, they have nothing left, as the moral rot at the top of the government has stolen their future, where “What the hell?” becomes their rallying cry, with suggestions that Japan has a hidden history of spontaneous protest, as Imamura perhaps advocates for more of the same addressing modern era concerns, “My greatest obsession was individual freedom — the condition that the state had denied us absolutely during the war years — and I became fascinated by existentialism.” Ine opens a French Can-Can revue which takes to the streets, like a 1960’s living theater, singing and dancing and cavorting in a display of sexually explicit, orgiastic revelry rivaling any Mardi Gras spectacle, which makes for an astonishing film experience, with hundreds upon hundreds of people dressed in crazy costumes, wearing outlandish makeup, filling the ‘Scope widescreen with an explosion of colors bursting with energy as the streets are filled by the carnivalesque, clownish revelers who continuously dance and sing “Eijanaika,” throwing flowers at the armed-to-the-hilt authorities, flaunting their freedom in numbers by refusing to disperse, overflowing across a bridge which separates Edo’s rich and poor districts. Instigated by anti-Shogunate forces to mask their plans for a coup d’état, it backfires into a chaotic street frenzy of looting and celebration that also includes the women mooning the rifle-toting army challenging them to shoot, creating a moment of “empty” freedom, a freedom of those who have lost everything and have nothing to lose, where government authority is meaningless, where only anarchy exists.
