Pigs and Battleships (Shohei Imamura, 1961) (Patreon)

Wow, this one's a doozie. I had forgotten just how much anarchic activity and social commentary Imamura could layer into a film, and at times both the plot and the frame are full to bursting with wild images and ideas. It's certainly a pleasure to see a film so replete and yet so formally controlled. And at the same time, Pigs and Battleships is a somewhat exhausting experience, a bit like a Very Special Episode of "The Phil Silvers Show" as orchestrated by Emir Kusturica. Needless to say, this kind of excess is a "sometimes food."

Like so many key films of the Japanese New Wave, Pigs and Battleships is a direct response to the American postwar occupation under the Marshall Plan. How will the big, boisterous, and often very shallow values of the U.S.A. infect a nation that's already undergoing an internal identity crisis? Where Nagisa Oshima understood this problem through the Marxist lens of capitalist exploitation and imperialism, almost always played as a matter of grave importance, Imamura goes for black comedy. There is so much going on, no one can keep track of it all, and this makes it easy for hucksters and two-bit con men to get a footing in the economy. This is a film of double- and triple-crosses, shifting alliances, and above all a smeared line between yakuza activity and "legitimate" business. While the Yanks are in town, all bets are off.

The main story takes quite a while to emerge. The central figure is a  lowly gangster and racketeer named Kinta (Hiroyuki Nagato) who engages in extortion and petty theft for the yakuza boss, Himori (Masao Mishima). Kinta's love interest Haruko (Jitsuko Yoshimura) is a peripheral club girl, hanging out where the American G.I.s like to party, but unlike many of her peers, she has not resorted to turning tricks. As it happens, her mother (Kin Sugai) wants to rent her out to an American serviceman / wheeler-dealer named Gordon, in hopes of securing financial stability. Kinta and Haruko have a spat that blows out of proportion, driving them apart -- Kinta further into the arms of fellow yakuza trying to set him up for a murder, and Haruko toward sexual debauchery at the hands of some particularly disgusting Americans.

Oh, yes. And there are pigs. The Himori gang becomes involved with various shady business interests in part-ownership and full guardianship of pens filled with pigs, a moneymaking scheme that is never fully articulated (or if it was, I missed it). By the end of the film, everyone is trying to unload the pig farm onto some other sucker, and eventually Kinta exacts revenge on those trying to set him up by unleashing the pigs in the middle of the Nightclub Quarter. The pig investment, it seems, was tied to a larger deal for selling "scraps" from the American military base, with the help of a former officer with connections.

I am not certain any of this is intended to make a lot of sense. (And watching a film like Pigs and Battleships, I could imagine Seijun Suzuki wondering, in turn, why he might not just dispense with plot altogether, which to some extent he did.) What comes through loud and clear is the equation of the Americans with the pigs: an irrational force that tromps through the streets despoiling everything it comes in contact with. Imamura generates a whirlwind of corruption and sexual exploitation without touching down on any given event long enough to lend it any real gravity in itself. 

Instead, the Occupation is atmospheric; it's a miasma of corruption and filth. Which makes the film's final scene all the more striking. When Haruko leaves her family behind to try her luck in Kawasaki, there's a defiance to her march against the tide of other girls racing to meet the cash-flush G.I.'s. It's like she's becoming a real character precisely by exiting the centrifuge and entering a clearing. In this regard, becoming a fully realized human for Imamura hinges on leaving behind the sheer clutter of the modern world. Marie Kondo would approve.