revenge is mine marked the return of Shohei Imamura, in 1979, to fiction cinema. The man who had been one of the most illustrious and brilliant representatives of the Japanese new wave in the early 1960s had abandoned it after the commercial failure of Deep desire of the gods in 1969. He had since devoted himself to documentaries, another way for him to question the nature of Japanese society starting, this time, from the aftermath of the Second World War.
The film is an adaptation of a novel by Ryuzo Saki based on the true story of a serial killer and con man who was arrested in 1963. Beginning his story with the arrest of the murderer, Imamura reveals a project entirely focused on the search for causalities. How did things come to this? What would explain the protagonist’s bloody journey?
Imamura’s cinema, and this from the first titles, is haunted by the desire to seek the deep, general causes that would program the behavior of individuals. The samples of the lumpenproletariat that constituted the herd of his films of the previous decade were subjects observed, sometimes coldly and cruelly, sometimes lovingly, by one who defined himself as an entomologist. Imamura’s cinema, from its origins, had the ambition to exercise a view that was both sociological and psychological. A look that would attempt to define and capture an energy entirely generated by the need for survival within a Japan plunged, since 1945, into a forced modernity, both economic and societal, by class relations and by a kind of libidinal expenditure, an ambiguous, liberating or alienating vital drive.
Cold report
The film is punctuated with written indications appearing on the screen, indicating in particular the place and the date of the crimes committed, conferring on the whole the status of a cold observation, perhaps intended to be the ironic expression of a relentless objectivity. This objectivity is here at the service of the painting of a macabre itinerary, that of an opaque and barbaric being, nourished by cruel lies and petty appetites, a journey strewn with corpses, on the margins of an indifferent society. Brilliantly interpreted by Ken Ogata, the hero of revenge is minedrunk with suicidal hatred, performs acts whose nature and motivations appear mysterious.
By chronologically deconstructing his story, alternating bare facts and their recension during interrogations of the criminal in his cell, Imamura seems to be looking for a key that is visibly untraceable. A childhood trauma (a father humiliated by an officer before the war), a marital disorder (the same father maintaining a relationship with his own step-daughter, the wife of the criminal), a Catholic education, therefore marginalized, the relations of money that define the relationships between individuals… Each element seems to constitute a plausible explanatory factor, but nothing seems to be sufficient to identify the deep nature of the criminal.
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