Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Binding: VHS Tape
EAN: 9781567302189
Format: Color
ISBN: 1567302181
Label: New Yorker Films
Manufacturer: New Yorker Films
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: New Yorker Films
Release Date: 2000-06-06
Running Time: 117
Studio: New Yorker Films
Theatrical Release Date: 1998-08-21

Customer Rating:
Summary: Morality slippery as an eel
Comment: Esteemed Japanese actor Kôji Yakusho ("Shall We Dance?") stars in "The Eel." Yakusho is a happily married business who suddenly begins receiving letters indicating that his wife is having an affair while he is away on fishing trips. So Yakusho returns home early from one of these fishing trips, catches his wife in the act, and brutally stabs her to death. After serving 8 years in prison, Yakusho attempts to rebuild his life as a barber in a small town with only his pet eel that he acquired in prison as a companion. He explains that he trusts the eel, as it cannot betray him. When he stumbles across a woman trying to kill herself, his suspiciousness gets the better of him; however, he eventually helps her and, in the process, changes his life.

I had heard great things about "The Eel" and knew that it had received the Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. I was expecting a film reflective perhaps even existential in tone befitting its allegorical approach. "The Eel," though, is much lighter, verging on romantic comedy at times; some scenes toward the end even border on slapstick. I found the tone confusing and somewhat inappropriate for the subject matter. To its credit, "The Eel" attempts to address some big issues - betrayal, redemption, guilt - and it does so in an ambiguous way that could have really illustrated the slippery nature of morality. Unfortunately, the script came across as pretty shallow and unreflective to me, which prevented it from saying anything new.

In the end, I'm not sure whether the main character has earned redemption. Perhaps that was the filmmaker's intention, and not all protagonists have to earn redemption to make a movie worthwhile, but I found it unsatisfying. Finally, the music score was one of the most intrusive I've encountered in recent years and undercut the movie's themes. I was hoping for a movie that shed some new light on guilt and redemption, but I was pretty disappointed.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: The Eel
Comment: Though Imamura's engaging psychodrama of regret and sexual repression opens on an overheated and violent act, it soon cools to a slow burn, as the friendship between two troubled people blossoms tenuously before taking an unexpected turn. Yakusho, an expert at playing stone-faced, emotionally distant protagonists, is both sympathetic and impossible to fathom. Poising the action between icy restraint and simmering catharsis, Imamura--who indulges himself in a couple of surreal vignettes--makes his "Eel" a reflecting pool for modern malaise.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Get swept along with the story of the"eel"
Comment: With a strong narrative, excellent acting, the tone wedded to the redemptive journey of the anti-hero, this a very fine film indeed. The quirky characters - working class philosophers, temper tantrum throwing rich thugs, an eccentric operatic type mad mother - plus the range of life styles that sit cheek by jowl in modern Japan, I relished in this film. One to own. Quite moving.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Love conquers all!
Comment: One of my favorite actors is K?ji Yakusho. He has a way of melting into his characters and becoming them in a very basic, natural manner. I hadn't realized he was in Unagi, (or had forgotten), so I was pleasantly surprised to witness another brilliant yet subdued performance on his part. Brilliant in 1997's Cure, acclaimed for his role in 1999's Charisma, 2000's K?rei, his brief appearance in 2001's horror masterpiece Kairo, a Jeremy Irons-like duplicitous role in 2003's Doppelg?nger, his resume is one of the best. This was the first non-horror film I've seen of his. In Unagi, he plays Takuro, a white-collar salaryman who works in the city and resides in a small countryside village with his beautiful wife named Emiko. He has a long commute to and from his job and a seemingly dull or uneventful job (although we only get a minimal glimpse of it at the very beginning of the film). On a regular basis, he joins friends, acquaintances and perhaps colleagues to fish the sea on a pier outside of the close-knit village.

Takuro squeezes onto the same train everyday, probably in the same car... well, you get the idea of a regimented lifestyle, but one Takuro seems to willingly get by with. One particular day on the trip home, he pulls an anonymous note from his pocket and reads that his wife has been having an affair, usually whilst he is fishing. I wondered why the movie didn't set the affair to coincide with him being at work, but it makes more sense when you see it. He makes his walk down the narrow road to his home and greets his smiling wife. He ditches his suit , accepts a prepared, boxed dinner (lovingly wrapped) and leaves per usual for much fishing. It's eery to hear Emiko ask "How long will you be gone?" as a viewer because we obviously know what's happening. Takuro doesn't miss a beat and responds that he'll 'be gone as long as usual'. Takuro spends a shorter time at the pier tan usual and bids the others farewell. On the way, he reminisces about the anonymous note; it also mentions what type and color the man arrived in. When he arrives to his home, he does find a white sedan parked and half-covered with brush next to the house. He sneaks around the house to a window and peeks thru the window. What follows is the reason he's sent to prison, where (at another unknown point) he catches and begins to confide in an eel (he's lost all trust in people) which he keeps in a prison fountain with help from a few guards. The guards allow him to keep the eel when his parole officer assumes custody of Takuro upon his release. Takuro begins to reestablish himself by purchasing a rundown barber shop in a tiny coastal town full of interesting characters and soon a mysterious woman enters the town. She brings a mix of disruption, controversy and maybe hope to the residents of the small coastal town and Takuro himself.

To Unagi's benefit (or not), the story is told with an array of styles. It doesn't stray form it's intention to take Takuros plight seriously, but at times, it seemed to go off on a tangent concerning other characters. I believe this was detrimental to bringing Takuro's redemption to fruition. I'm not saying that developing the other characters is a mistake, I'm just saying that in this case it worked against a complete resolution. Hell, for all I know, that could of been the objective all along; for the ending to remain open-ended and unresolved fully. With characters like Akira Emoto's character Tamotsu (Maborosi, Doppelg?nger) as Takuro's level-headed, wise, father figure-type new friend, could conceivably live on past the ending. The film as a whole has that sort of natural feel to it and an uncanny sense of taking place in two different eras. Add a touch of hilarity now and then to ease the dramatic air and this turns out to be a surprisingly solid movie.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: 2nd REVISED REVIEW: Guilt and Redemption
Comment: Guilt and Redemption are the pervasive themes of this quirky, disturbing, very fine film from Shohei Imamura. The consequences of the instantaneous loss of control molds this story in the way such life happenstances unfold - slowly - and Imamura knows how to take us with him in this strange tale, pausing here and there for the surreal, dreamlike sequences that can and do alter our perceptions of reality.

Takuro Yamashita (Kôji Yakusho) is a quietly married blue-collar worker who spends some evenings fishing for sport and food, his passive wife Emiko (Chiho Terada) sending him off with boxed lunches. Takuro receives an anonymous letter that states his wife is having an affair while he slips away to fish. Incredulous, Takuro returns early from his nocturnal fishing to find his wife engaged in flagrante and Takuro stabs her to death, then bicycles to the police station and turns himself in for the murder of Emiko. He is imprisoned for eight years and conforms to the rigid life of the incarcerated, his only companion is a pet eel with whom he feels he can communicate.

Here the film's story begins. Upon release from prison, Takuro is placed under the supervision of a kindly priest who helps him start a barbershop, living a quiet secluded life, his only friends being his pet eel and a strange character who has set up a field station to attract friendly aliens from outer space! All is calm until he encounters the disturbed Keiko (Misa Shimizu) who closely resembles his murdered wife. Takuro saves Keiko from a suicide attempt and the priest encourages him to take on Keiko as an assistant.

Takuro is emotionally dead over his guilt for the murder of his wife and refuses to entertain the idea of opening himself to Keiko's affectionate advances. There are too many similarities between the dead Emiko and the frightened Keiko. Yet when all of the forces collide in the climax of the film, Takuro realizes how much of his past is mixed with fantasy/nightmare and, equally, how much his present is dependent on his interaction with Keiko, the priest, his sci-fi friend and the forces who would destroy Keiko and his quiet existence. Though the ending is somewhat marred by an unfortunately Keystone Kops type silly sequence, it suggests that the cracks in Takuro's mental armor may be healed as the possibility for redemption unfolds in a tender way.

There are many levels of interpretation to this fable and to explore each of them would rob the first-time viewer of this little film of the pleasure of the chess game Imamura sets for us. The acting is solid, the night scenes are lovely, and the day scenes are as visually chaotic as the real world in which we live. There could be improvements in the editing, definitely in the musical score and in the camera work. But those are minor blemishes in this film that engages the mind in the challenge of entering a new mode of thought. A strange little film, this, and not for everyone. Grady Harp, May 05

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