Vengeance is Mine

Akira Nishiguchi killed five people and defrauded others in a crime spree across Japan in 1964. Serial killers such as he have always been fascinating for the public at large as they're seen as aberrations, individuals who exist ahistorically and who are not, at least in part, the product of their relationships with other people. Shohei Imamura's 1979 film Vengeance is Mine begins with Nishiguchi's fictional stand-in Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata) already in police custody. It's immediately established that he killed five people and with his capture not in question, all that's left is to develop the who's and why's. There are a slew of competent films that explore the personality of a killer as part of a police procedural. Few go to the extent that Imamura does, putting Enokizu's psychology on display through his relationships with his father, wife, girlfriend and others.

Imamura's assured direction avoids easy answers in looking at Enokizu. The killer could as much be an aberration as he could be the victim of the hypocritical and callous society that produced him. Played to stony perfection by Ogata, Enokizu poses as a lawyer and a university professors while defrauding some of his marks and killing others. His behavior in each face he wears is convincing enough to suggest he might even give that life a try if he could. As a university professor he shacks up with Maru (Mayumi Ogawa) and with a good degree of steam they take the fraud to the inevitable conclusion. As a lawyer he strikes up a conversation with a fellow barrister on a train which leads to one of the most effecting scenes in the film with Enokizu drinking himself stupid while trying to keep an uncooperative closet door shut. The film makes no clear judgments about Enokizu. He and his actions speak for themselves, as do the numerous other betrayals and deceptions that are dotted throughout. This docu-realism allows Enokizu, though blatantly amoral and abusive, to be shown in a view that demands sympathy only marginally less than revulsion and leads to a jarring change of style in the last scene where it's shown just how hard it is to lie rotten bones to rest.

"Am I Your Wife?"

It's possible that Shohei Imamura was an optimist or sorts; positing that humans tend to be born as moral beings. Any hints of that optimism are thoroughly squashed by the end of his Insect Woman; a phenomenal investigation of what social forces change one from moral to pragmatic. The literal translation of the title (Nippon Konchuku) is "The Etymological Chronicles of Japan", a phrase more clearly invoking the the social forces that exchange idealism to pragmatism. The sharp class analysis in Insect Woman is like a continued series of punches to the gut (welcome ones somehow) where the only humor is dark and the only redemption is teasing.

A beetle methodically crawls across the screen in the opening sequence, one immediately revisited with Chuji (Kazuo Kitamura) struggling to get home to his family; one including his daughter Tome with whom he lives as husband and wife from a very young age. The film leaves open whether or not he is her biological father and this exemplifies the type of reaction Imamura pulls from the viewer here; "Man I really hope that rape isn't incestuous too!" It's the most optimistic statement one can reasonably make from the context provided. The victimization of Tome continues through adolescence and adulthood until she is sufficiently beaten down to take on the role of victimizer herself, first of her peers, and eventually of her own daughter.

The beetle at the beginning of the film has no choice in its actions. It is driven to survive and, luckily for it one might say, is not burdened with reason or compassion in its drive. More than any of his films, Imamura brings to Insect Woman the degree to which society produces it own villains. His coleopteran metaphor reduces his characters to physical beings, ones that start out with hopes and dreams and end with, well, whatever little bit they have to hang on to.; their dignity stripped down to mere survival.

American Zombie

"It's impossible to get credit as a zombie"

Do you like zombie films? Because this one is awesome. Really, really awesome. Director Grace Lee gained some fame with her 2005 film The Grace Lee Project, a middling documentary that superficially investigated the lives of various Grace Lee's to little effect. She returns with American Zombie, an exercise in/parody of cinema verité and investigative documentaries that looks at the living dead, or "revenant", community living in Los Angeles. The films follows Grace Lee around as she documents, through interviews with zombies and others, the problems faced by those who are not living.

John Solomon plays against Lee as her co-director. He seeks to take a more confrontational look at zombies, constantly pressing them about eating flesh, checking their refrigerators for any evidence of such, and asking tactless question about their rotting flesh. Lee prefers to look at the zombie lifestyle and their civil rights problems. She interviews Joel (Al Vicente) to great effect about his work as a zombie rights advocate (Recognizing that it's all One Big Fight, he is seen marching with anti-war protesters with his Zombies Against The War sign). He is also the organizer of the annual zombie version of Burning Man, called, and it could not be otherwise, Live Dead. As good as Joel is, two other characters steal every scene they're in. Ivan (Austin Basis) and Judy (Suzy Nakamura) are polar opposites as zombies. Judy does what she can, socially, economically and culturally, to pass for living. She doesn't talk about being a zombie, and the zombie lifestyle remains a mystery of sorts for her. Ivan has no such qualms and looks forward the entire year to Live Dead while shtupping his way through girls who slum with zombies. He's given most of the best lines (discussing his diet, "I try to get as many preservatives into my body as possible.") and Basis performs them to zombie slacker perfection in the run-up to Live Dead. What starts as a comedy based on zombie idiosyncrasies and the conflict between the directors morphs into an effective, and still funny, horror film.

George Romero's zombies are always stand-ins for consumers, the lower class, or some segment of the populace being fleeced. Lee follows the zombie-film-as-social-commentary tradition in American Zombie with one able to make a very reasonable comparison between the film's zombies and undocumented immigrants. The denial of social services that zombies face, as well as the human community's general unwillingness to recognize them as part of broader society lead the zombies to live in a more closed community, one whose isolation is guaranteed from without, and eventually from within. Is this the reason for the zombies' destructive behavior? It's a good question to ask the next time you're set upon by flesh-eating Mexicans. Or maybe the metaphor doesn't go quite that far.

All films are playing at the Gene Siskel theater during January. Check listings for dates of screening. Comments and discussion are welcome.