Go fish

>> The surreal Japanese oddity The Eel

by MATTHEW HAYS

The opening set-up for Japanese filmmaker Shohei Imamura's The Eel is horrifying. A man (Koji Yakusho) learns that his wife is having an affair. Slipping home one night when he's supposed to be off fishing, he spies her having a passionate romp in bed with another man. Infuriated, Yakusho enters the room, butcher knife in hand, and does his wife in, Halloween style. (Audiences are given the splatter-cam treatment, as blood packs spray the lens of the camera.)

After coolly and calmly walking over to the cop station and turning himself in, Yakusho then serves eight years in prison for the crime. Imamura doesn't show us much of the prison years; we simply see Yakusho leaving after being granted parole. But the murderous protagonist doesn't leave alone; it seems he's befriended an eel he kept in the prison pond, which he carries out in a plastic bag. Though there are no sexual overtones, these two are pretty tight. The advantages of man-eel bonding are explained: the eel always listens to him, but doesn't talk back. (No reason is given as to why our hero doesn't simply settle for a nice plant.)

The eel soon becomes a bit of a heavy-handed symbol for Yakusho's tortured, damaged psyche. He begins a new life as a hairdresser and, as movie logic would have it, soon finds that an adoring, attractive woman (Misa Shimizu) has developed a crush on him after he saves her from a suicide attempt. But Yakusho isn't ready for any kind of new intimacy--at least not beyond the eel--and pushes Shimizu away at ever turn.

It's a genre-busting ride, with elements of the melodrama, gangster movies, romance and even a bit of slapstick comedy thrown in (not to mention that wacky thing with the eel).

An interesting masala of styles and tones, one that Imamura handles well. But audiences might just be held back by the filmmaker's assumption of both sympathy and identification with his protagonist, who brutally slice-and-diced his wife at film's opening. When Robert Duvall depicted a redemptive journey in The Apostle, audience members were supplied with an ambiguous protagonist and therefore given the choice to like or dislike him. Not so in The Eel, where we're expected to root for Yakusho from the get-go.

The Eel opens (with English subtitles) Friday, June 18 at the Cinéma du Parc. See repertory listings for showtimes