Profound Desires of the Gods (1968) [Masters of Cinema #102] [Re-UP]

Posted By: Someonelse
Date: April 21, 2015

Profound Desires of the Gods (1968)
DVD9 | ISO+MDS | NTSC 16:9 | 02:53:36 | 7,42 Gb
Audio: Japanese AC3 2.0 @ 256 Kbps | Subtitles: English
Genre: Drama | Masters of Cinema #102

Director: Shôhei Imamura
Stars: Rentarô Mikuni, Chôichirô Kawarasaki, Kazuo Kitamura

The culmination of Shôhei Imamura’s extraordinary examinations of the fringes of Japanese society throughout the 1960s, Profound Desires of the Gods [Kamigami no fukaki yokubô] was an 18-month super-production which failed to make an impression at the time of its release, but has since risen in stature to become one of the most legendary - albeit least seen - Japanese films of recent decades.

Presenting a vast chronicle of life on the remote Kurage Island, the film centres on the disgraced, superstitious, interbred Futori family and the Tokyo engineer sent to supervise the creation of a new well - an encounter which leads to both conflict and complicity in strange and powerful ways.

A tragic view of a passing epoch that teeters on the edge of grotesque farce, Imamura’s merciless gaze combines with spectacular colour ‘Scope photography to create a mythic saga convulsing with earthly impulses. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present this unforgettable work in an exclusively restored progressive encode for the first time ever on DVD.

IMDB | Eureka - Masters of Cinema | Wikipedia | Midnight Eye

As a culmination of Shohei Imamura's work beginning with the 1963 feature Pigs and Battleships, his troubled production Profound Desires of the Gods - a bloated 18-month shoot that was a financial failure and so souring to Imamura that he didn't return to traditional (using the term loosely) fiction filmmaking until over a decade later - now provides something of a click inside the mind of the viewer already familiar with the director. It's been tough to see in the English-speaking world prior to this Masters of Cinema Blu-ray edition, but the wait suddenly feels forgivable, a means of earning such a lovely disc and booklet. Though there is no ideal place to begin with in watching the films of Imamura, I'm especially reluctant to recommend this as a starting point. Instead, perhaps go for Criterion's excellent Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes box set or either the Criterion or MoC release of Vengeance Is Mine (coming soon to Blu-ray via the latter label). By all means, though, still consider picking up this new Blu-ray as soon as possible. It might just be where Imamura's idiosyncrasies finally click for you.


Why would Profound Desires of the Gods, an often difficult and enormously eccentric movie, be the work to possibly unlock Imamura beyond some of the basic things that tend to get repeated about his themes and interests (i.e., the preoccupation with social anthropology, the penchant for making messy films, and his confessed fascination with mixing the lower body of humans with the lower rungs of society)? Beginning with Pigs and Battleships, his fifth film but the first that he could comfortably be considered to have "authored," Imamura often explored the plights of rather ordinary individuals mired inside Japanese society. His heroines, particularly, were resilient women who placed survival above all else. One might, and Imamura explicitly did, compare them to various insects and untamed creatures who subconsciously recognized their limitations but quickly discovered their strengths as well. The role of postwar Japan, and the enormous Western influence that Imamura perceived as infecting his nation, also became a major aspect of these films. Profound Desires solidifies much of this while both commenting on and dissecting ideas broached previously.


To be clear, there are really just five earlier pictures that form the discussion here. Pigs and Battleships was followed by The Insect Woman, Intentions of Murder, The Pornographers and the very strange, very brilliant pseudo-documentary A Man Vanishes. For those enamored with Imamura, these are five of the finest movies of the decade. Excepting perhaps the first, they aren't, however, terribly accessible. The approach in each of these could be described as clinical, cool even. What doesn't necessarily register initially is that Imamura is actually a selective humanist. His reluctance to guide the viewer emotionally - with the later Vengeance Is Mine acting as the most extreme example of this - might be off-putting to some, but it seems to be a means of objectivity where the plane is absolutely equal. This preference is likely what drove Imamura into the unique type of documentaries he turned to after Profound Desires. The notable use of assorted bugs and animals to create a kind of bridge between humans and their less civilized counterparts is a defining point. It shows, and is particularly illustrated in Profound Desires, an affinity for all creatures who struggle to maintain their existence. If your concerns extend beyond survival then Imamura likely has no interest or sympathy.


That the director's own upbringing was decidedly upper middle-class and comfortable, and that he secured opportunities to attend a prestigious university and later apprentice under Yasujiro Ozu (whose films he continually maintained a dislike for), only adds another peg of knowledge for Imamura. He infiltrated the seedier side of Japanese life on his own and simply found it for his liking and admiration over the more cushy existence he'd grown up in. Perhaps it was this experience or a incident elsewhere that allowed for it, but something that's rather unique about the films Imamura directed is that the viewer is able to quite literally smell them. Scoff and express disbelief all you want, it's completely true. In the irresistible climax of Pigs and Battleships, the porcine stampede exudes very specific odors of the pigs on impromptu parade and their unmistakable smell. The Insect Woman confides a certain whiff of stale female sweat after copulation while Intentions of Murder has some of the same and a bit more in the form of the chilly, stagnant air from the darkened tunnel where the heroine and her rapist meet on the way to Tokyo. The Pornographers, of course, stinks of aged trout and musty 8mm smut.


The island setting of Profound Desires and its color cinematography indicate a completely new smell. It's somewhat pungent, indicative of mild body odor but also with a sickly sweet hint of sugar cane. At times, you can almost detect a dry mix of salt and sand-covered Earth. What Imamura does in the film, and why it deserves to be seen as a final chapter of sorts in this period of his work, involves an indulgence of themes to the point of newfound clarity. The dregs of a society are here, as are the looming images of snakes and lizards and birds and whatever else Imamura can find to connect his humans to their animal counterparts. Males are either weak or overly cunning while one of the females shown tends to be rational and the other, a half-wit, is almost feral in her attachment to the primitiveness of nature. It's this connection to the outdoors that forms a significant theme of the film, where the distinction between natural and unnatural, or, as Imamura himself instructed, regular and irregular, goes unnoticed among the characters only to be pointed out somewhat coyly to the viewer. Thus, whereas the director's previous efforts had situated various aspects of nature as a reflection of his characters, Profound Desires comes full circle to allow the characters to be at one with nature. They are, per their status as inhabitants of a largely unmodernized island, inseparable from their surroundings, for better or worse.


Just as Imamura declines to pass judgment, he also decides against the simplification of these undertakings. A key to it all is the realization that both animal and human receive the same treatment and the same sympathy. Early on in the film, a pig goes overboard into the ocean and is quickly devoured by a shark, much the same as the man who later suffers a nearly identical fate. The anthropological curiosity Imamura so enjoys is grounded in the belief that organisms are fascinating to study and watch when they are at their most primal. The earlier films he directed in the '60s situated their human protagonists in supposedly civilized societies. Imamura, though, still presents his characters in these pictures as adhering to their natural instincts amid the necessary yet unnatural settings of cities and villages. They adapt as needed but it's always a struggle to suppress desire and compromise for fear of facing outside criticism. By finally allowing the island inhabitants in Profound Desires to be constantly drenched in the dirt and sweat of their native land, Imamura comes full circle. It's still fiction filmmaking but he's now able to study his subjects in their natural habitat.


For much of the film, the director employs his favored position of voyeur. He seemed to master this penchant for peeping tom-style angles in The Pornographers and then took it to a decidedly more complex level with A Man Vanishes. At times, the camera acts as an unwelcome observer in Profound Desires but Imamura later seems to abandon this idea. It's almost as if he's making the viewer shyly get to know the characters before removing that sheen so that a greater truth can be revealed. Long shots from outside windows and squinting peeks from the distance aren't uncommon, but the instance of Imamura's voyeuristic eye at play that most stands out is when the character of Ryu and his mistress Uma are seen out of focus from a God's eye view. An overhead light fixture with lizards lurking freely helps to conceal the tension down below. It's a marvelous shot.


Uma, in a forbidden love with her brother Nekichi, has been recognized as a noro, or shaman of the island who has the ability to communicate directly with the gods. Nekichi was punished long ago for the insinuations of incest with Uma and now carries a chain around his ankle. Their complicated desires form a parallel with the mythological origins of the island. A trickle down of incest extends to Nekichi's son Kame and daughter Toriko. This family, the Futoris, are often maligned as beasts by others on the island. They face punishment at the hands of the locals but Imamura seems to favor them for a certain pureness they possess. He essentially paints the Futoris as the main characters, and fairly sympathetic ones at that. Their reluctance to accept the given narrative about the island and its future also plays in their favor, with customs dismissed as superstition on more than one occasion. Whether the latter is actually endorsed by Imamura would be tough to say. A sense of tragedy strikes the Futoris and also furthers the mystical qualities of the island. By the end, the cynicism seen in previous films from Imamura becomes inevitable. He's clearly averse to Western interference and the subsequent desecration of Japan. That such a footprint spread to more remote areas like the Okinawa-set island seen in Profound Desires seemed to have infuriated Imamura. He grows passive-aggressive in damning the Western influence by strewing images of Coca-Cola, perhaps the ultimate emblem of capitalism, around the film's finale.


Profound Desires of the Gods is a remarkably rich film experience. Imamura's statement that he liked to make messy films has probably never been more applicable than it is here, an effort that stands as perhaps his messiest. Its scope is at once epic and intimate. The affection for Japan, its denizens of lower social class, and all of the perceived irregularities that follow overtake the eccentricities of the plot to reveal a director gasping for air in a system he was anxious to abandon. He of course did, only to come back and make one of the best movies of his career with Vengeance Is Mine and later earn a pair of Palme d'or awards at Cannes. There are some definite similarities between Profound Desires and Ballad of Narayama, the first of his plaudit-earners. The latter achieves a poignancy and disruption of emotion that he wasn't so much interested in with the '60s work but that ambition of youth (or something like it) is much more on display here. Imamura likely couldn't have made something so daring later in his career. Profound Desires exudes confidence. It finds a filmmaker at a crossroads, ready to expand upon his earlier work and undeterred by obstacles.
Home Cinema @ The Digital Fix

Special Features:
- Beautiful new progressive encode in the film’s original aspect ratio
- New and improved optional English subtitle translation
- Introduction by Tony Rayns (11:37)
- Japanese Trailer with English subtites (5:28)


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