Vengeance is Mine 復讐するは我にあり (1979)
Vengence is Mine is a film by Imamura Shohei. It is a complex and intricate study of a killer and more importantly how he became that way. Based on the true story of serial killer Akira Nishiguchi A.K.A. the black gold medalist, who after killing two, took the police on 3 month nationwide man hunt in which he killed 3 more before being apprehended. The failure of the police to apprehend Nishiguchi in a timely matter led to sweeping reforms of the Japanese policing system. Subsequently, Nishiguchi was hung for his crimes.
The way this story is told comes off striking. The film is shot in an unstable order. For instance, using short temporal cuts, the film’s opening leads us to the body of the first victim being found then cutting quickly to the suspect already apprehended back to his actual act then to the interrogation room. It was shot in documentary style further blurring the lines of fiction adding to the films overall instability. This messy structure I think was done for two reasons, a) to give distance between the killer and the audience preventing the audience from identifying any sort of heart in the main character; b) it also serves to accentuate the discontentment and actual psychology of the character. I say this because Imamura’s camera is always in motion at a frantic unsettling pace. This whole unstable fluid motion of both time (the story structure) and space (tight framing and constant camera movement), relates all to the killer’s distorted sense of self, creating a genuine feel for the movie. In addition, this camera work is also striking, as a quick study of the directors background reveals that he got his start in filmmaking with Ozu Yasujiro (who is often considered as the best Japanese filmmaker). Ozu was well known for his open, symmetrical framing with absolutely no camera movement. So you see everything Imamura does is counteractive to his mentor and other Japanese great Mizoguchi Kenji and their entire directorial philosophy.
The characterization in this film is amazing. One can’t help but be amazed at the killers every scene for his unstable manner in which he operates. Generally, the director in all of his characters has a way of bringing out what people want to hide most in themselves no matter how ugly or dirty. One of the most amazing scenes of the film comes between the mother and the killer after a boat race. As they walk along a lone river, the killer braces to kill her as she comments, without looking, to the futility of such an act. Shots of the river water juxtaposed off the two, metaphorically describes both the killer’s and the mother’s unstable character. In the river we see an eel stuck on a twig against the current, to which the mother responds about how much the world has changed to which the killer agrees. Further along they comes across an eel hatchery filled with constrained eels, giving off to me the two dilemmas that face the characters. Breakout and end up caught in life on something as trivial as a twig in the current or struggle for an existence with everyone else. Throughout the film, is the theme of discontentment rather through camera movement or the actual characters themselves that single eel stuck on a twig describes it all.
The final scene which sees the killer’s father and wife throwing his bones of a peak is amazing! As each bone is thrown a shot of the bone was caught in a freeze frame. Finally upon throwing the final bone we get a cut to an angle from the free space looking back at the two. This view point could only be ascribed to the killer looking on, in what could be taken as a carried defiance into the afterlife, falling in line with the Japanese belief that the dead tend to linger. Vengeance perhaps was his….Vengeance is Mine is an amazing film.
