All of these interests converge in Profound Desires of the Gods, a major film from 1968 that has been less widely viewed than such other acclaimed Imamura works as Vengeance Is Mine (1979), a harrowing crime drama, and The Ballad of Narayama (1983), an elemental family drama. The relative obscurity of Profound Desires of the Gods is ironic, since Imamura himself was frustrated by the difficulties he ran into while filming it on location in Ishigaki, an island in the Okinawa archipelago. Principle photography was supposed to last six months but went on for almost a year and a half, prompting complaints from the Nikkatsu studio and driving Imamura to abandon feature filmmaking in favor of TV documentaries for the next decade of his career. According to a Senses of Cinema essay by film scholar Adam Bingham, the struggle to get this particular vision on film made Imamura cynical about "the ability of fiction to reflect what he termed 'people's true nature,'" prompting him "to return to the simplicity of non-fiction in which he could go back to basics and make films quickly and cheaply," examining the lives of "ordinary individuals who would otherwise remain hidden, invisible."
Those are precisely the sorts of people who populate Profound Desires of the Gods. The film signals the cosmic side of its story in the title and in the primeval creation myth chanted to village children (and the movie's viewers) by a venerable bard near the beginning of the tale, recounting an incestuous encounter between male and female deities that brought the fictional island of Kurage into existence. Incest is a pivotal plot device and cultural metaphor in the film, which centers largely on members of the Futori clan, an incestuous family that's treated with alternating waves of mockery, hatred and bemused condescension by the island's other inhabitants (who aren't models of sophisticated behavior themselves). The film's earthbound, fleshly side is signaled by a great number of shots and sequences that connect the human and animal domains, reminding us that snakes, lizards, ants, fish and other creatures are separated from our supposedly superior species by thin, wavering boundaries that are sometimes almost impossible to detect. Imamura made this a crucial theme in The Ballad of Narayama, and it's no less indispensable here.
Especially when members of the Futori family are playing their wild, often reckless tricks. The head of the clan is Yamamori, a ferocious old man whose children include Toriko, a psychologically disabled daughter; Nekichi, a son whose mother was a daughter of Yamamori who died after giving birth to him; Uma, a priestess who loves Nekichi but resists his efforts to start a sexual relationship with her; and Kametaro, a son who finds the rest of family somewhere between embarrassing and insufferable.
Not surprisingly, the rest of the islanders keep this bunch at a distance, and Nekichi is literally chained in a pit as punishment for breaking a local taboo by using dynamite to increase his fishing catch. He manages to escape from time to time, using his temporary freedom to chase after women in the area, but his best hope for permanent release is to finish the near-impossible job of displacing a gigantic boulder from the pit where he's confined, thereby removing a barrier to fresh water desperately needed to irrigate nearby rice paddies and sugar crops. The incestuous activities of the Futori family are sardonic echoes of the divinely sanctioned incest sung about by the wandering bard, suggesting that the Kurage of today is a fallen and corrupted version of the Kurage that emerged from the sea at the whim of omnipotent gods.
Additional characters represent the modern world, which has un-profound desires of its own regarding Kurage and its residents. A sugar corporation has started an ambitious operation competing with the island's traditional rice farming, and a deep new well is needed to compensate for shortfalls of rain and for the water impeded by the humongous boulder that Nekichi is laboring to remove. An engineer named Kariya arrives to supervise the boring of the well, and Kurage's indigenous chief, Ritsugen, assigns Kametaro to facilitate cooperation between the corporate enterprise and the island's interests. This links the cosmopolitan Kariya with the problematic Futori family and complications inevitably arise.
The innumerable wildlife shots in Profound Desires of the Gods point directly to Imamura's reawakened interest in documentary cinema, as do the anthropological episodes involving the chanting of the bard, the rituals of Uma's shamanistic group and the technology put into play by Kariya's team. Paradoxically, however, the film gives an equally strong impression of freewheeling fantasy, enhanced by ghostly presences, mythical undercurrents and overtones, and otherworldly color effects made all the more remarkable by the fact that this is Imamura's first color production. Imamura was no newcomer to grotesquerie--the English-language titles of films like Pigs and Battleships (1961) and The Insect Woman (1963) bear out his ongoing fascination with the uncanny and bizarre--and Profound Desires of the Gods is perhaps his most successful effort to weave the inexplicable and the everyday into a seamless cinematic whole. Its reputation has risen steadily since its release in 1968, and admirers of modern Japanese film will continue to sing its praises in years to come.
Director: Shohei Imamura
Producer: Masanori Hasegawa
Screenplay: Keiji Hasebe, Shohei Imamura
Cinematographer: Masao Tochizawa
Film Editing: Mutsuo Tanji
Production Design: Takeshi Omura
Music: Toshiro Mayuzumi
With: Rentaro Mikuni (Nekichi Futori), Choichiro Kawarasaki (Kametaro Futori), Hideko Okiyama (Toriko Futori), Kanjuro Arashi (Yamamori Futor), Yasuko Matsui (Uma Futori), Kazuo Kitamura (Kariya), Yoshi Kato (Ritsugen Ryu), Izumi Hara (Unari Ryu)
Color-173m.
By David Sterritt
