6.5/10
(Note: spoilers below)
Tomu Uchida's The Strait of Hunger draws a lot of comparisons to Akira Kurisawa's High and Low, and for good reason - black and white Japanese films released 2 years apart ('63 for Kurosawa's, '65 for Hunger) divided into three acts involving similar themes - poverty and desperation, criminals on the run, police procedurals, morality struggles...one difference is that High and Low is set in the present while Strait begins in 1940 and continues on into the 60's.
Whereas Kurosawa's film was shorter and tighter still, Uchida's is longer and more rambling. It begins with a bang - main character Inukai and two convicts are on the run and have to steal a boat in the thick of a typhoon to cross the strait, a sequence that is shot in breathtaking, almost cinema verite style (I wouldn't be surprised if Uchida appropriated newsreel footage at some points; at least that's what it looks like he does). Abruptly we fast forward to the police investigating the drownings from a capsized boat, victim of the typhoon. They find two unclaimed corpses that weren't on the passenger list. Considering Inukai is wandering the land on the other side of the strait, it's not hard for the viewer to figure who these bodies are. Inukai peeks into a shanty house where a shaman-esque woman is giving a demonic sermon that seems oddly applicable to Inukai's own fate. Terrified, he flees, and hitches a ride a dilapidated monorail type thing where he meets a geisha named Yae. With nowhere else to go he follows her home. Inukai stays the night while Yae discusses her family's debts. In a beguiling sequence, Yae wraps herself in a blanket and pretends to mock Inukai as a spirit - she swallows him with the blanket, obscuring him from the camera. The shot lingers, and Uchida toys with the viewer's perception as to whether Yae is making love to Inukai or getting strangled. Finally it turns out to be the former. Yae clips Inukai's nails - Inukai is moved by her story and leaves her a massive sum of money from the bag one of his dead companions carried around. The investigator assigned to the perplexing case is advancing extremely slowly - no one can figure out who these two corpses are, or who burned the boat they stole on the other side of the strait, but it's becoming clearer that Inukai is a wanted man.
At this point in the movie the story more or less grinds to a halt as we follow Yae's life. She's a geisha and a prostitute and the profession is about to be outlawed. She's paid off all her debts from the money Inukai left her and constantly fantasizing about meeting up with him again - her savior. She's even saved a nail clipping from the night at her house, which she talks to, worships, and sensually rubs over her face. I'm not kidding. She is also pursued by the investigator of the capsized boat, who has now pieced together the fact that the two mystery men were murdered and the third boat thief is still at large, but she lies to him to protect Inukai. Anyway it's this act of the movie where Uchida lost most of my interest, largely because he seemed more interesting in waxing political and trying to cram in as many of his different viewpoints as he could.
Some fifteen years later, Yae comes across a newspaper with a photo of a man she believes to be Inukai, despite the paper giving his name as Tarumi. She tracks the man down and confronts him, determined to thank her for the money that saved her life. Tarumi, a well-to-do business man with a large house and a servant, denies knowing her. Yae persists, and recognizes him to be Inukai due to his deformed thumb, which she noticed back at her geisha house ten years ago. His past having caught up to him, Uchida strangles her as well as his servant, who witnesses the murder. He dumps the bodies in the river, where they are found by a new set of police investigators.
The investigators interview Inukai, who admits the man was his servant, but professes no knowledge of the woman, and suggests the two were lovers and their deaths a double suicide. Digging into "Tarumi"'s past, the investigators (along with the detective of the boat disaster of 10 years prior) slowly match up his life and where he has been with the mystery fugitive. They present their case to Tarumi and he denies everything. They show him the nail and the newspaper picture they found on Yae's corpse, and he confesses, but insists on setting the record straight - he didn't murder his two companions fifteen years ago - they stole the boat, killed the owners, torched the town, turned on another and then on him and, in self-defense, he threw his attacker into the strait. Convinced no one would believe him, he kept his assailant's satchel of money, giving it to Yae. He had been on the run, more or less, for 15 years for a crime he didn't commit. Telling the truth or turning the money in wasn't an option, he says - no one would believe him. So he "went straight" (when he was never really crooked to begin with) and used the money to pay off a guilt that he should never had had to endure. The past catching up to him being too much to bear, he murdered Yae, although he never admits this much - he instead insists on going back to the shore of the strait where he would tell the investigators everything. On the ferry in the strait, the original investigator tosses flowers into the water in memory of Yae, and commands Uchida to do the same. Uchida takes the flowers yet hurls himself overboard. His body swallowed by the strait, the movie closes on an extended shot of the water's horizon.
***
I think I've been guilty of saying this before about a Japanese movie...but this is a very Japanese movie. It seems to encompass a lot of themes and feelings of the immediate post-war Japan, specifically poverty and the struggle to survive in a brutal, defeated time. I suppose it would be easy to see Inukai as representing many Japanese after the war, harboring feelings of guilt for a disaster he really wanted no part in, and forced by those times to extreme measures. It's the kind of movie I didn't particularly enjoy while I watched it - at three hours, the material seemed spread thin, with Uchida trying to say as much as he could with the running time he had. It resulted in a messy, overlong film, but one that certainly gave me a lot to think about after it was over. I didn't enjoy it very much, but I am glad that I watched it.
Uchida has a very unique directing style - a shocking amount of scenes were apparently shot handheld, the camera sometimes drifting crazily over what should be a simple, static shot. I have no idea what the reason for this is. Other times (in memory or fantasy sequences mostly) the film is switched to negative, giving a disorienting effect (see here for an example). Another thing he likes to do that I didn't enjoy is that he likes to have his characters talk about something rather than show it. A huge portion of this film is characters telling other characters things we've already seen, or hypothesizing over things we already know (the identity of the corpses, for example). Generally my feeling is that if you have the viewers know something before the characters do, you either have to do something to make us want to watch these guys figure it out, or have them solve it soon. There is a stark lack of tension or excitement for most of the running time. It clearly works better as an essayist film rather than a potboiler. While I don't doubt that was Uchida's intention, as I said, it didn't make for thrilling viewing for me. But it's hard to imagine a stronger case for the feelings in Japan at the time both that the movie is set in and of its release date.
All that said, I'm happy it was a selection and that I got to see it...I just don't think I'll be getting back to it any time soon.
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