| Kanzo
Sensei
Shohei Imamura Japan/France
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| Shohei Imamura is one of only four directors – the others being
Francis Ford Coppola, Billie August, and Emir Kusturica – to be awarded
the Golden Palm twice – winning for The Ballad of Narayama in 1983 and
for The Eel last year. He is also the only one of this august group to
have left Cannes on both occasions before the international jury announced
him the winner at the awards ceremonies.
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| A shy, modest man, the 72-year-old Japanese auteur director,
who began his career as an assistant to Ozu, prefers to let his films speak
for themselves. Kanzo Sensei, Imamura's 25th film, marks the fifth occasion
he has been invited to participate in the official selection. Following
The Ballad of Narayama, a remake of Keisuki Kinoshita's screen adaptation
of Shichiro Fukasawa's award-winning novel, he returned to the Croisette
in 1987 with Zegen (The Pimp), based on the nebulous life and sexploits
of Oriental prostitution kingpin Iheiji Muraoka from 1902 to 1941. And
he was back again two years later with Black Rain (1989), an indictment
of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima with life-draining radiation effects
lasting to the present day. When Akira Kurosawa was not representing Japan
in the Main Programme at Cannes, then Shohei Imamura usually was.
If there is a link to be noted between The Eel and Kanzo Sensei, then it is in the person of Akira Emoto, the actor who plays the key supporting role of the friendly neighbour in the former and now the lead role of the compassionate, 50-year-old Dr Akagi in the latter. But the real link is with Black Rain, the costly production that proved a flop at the box office and forced a seven-year absence from the director's chair. Once again, the metaphor is the bomb: set at the close of the war and just prior to the Japanese surrender, it explodes over Hiroshima in the near distance. Dr Akagi – or 'Dr Liver,' as the Japanese title of the novel by Ango Sakaguchi (1906-1956) translates – practices medicine in a seaside village and is greatly concerned by the spread of hepatitis among his patients. Like Imamura's own physician-father, to whom the film is personally dedicated, he believes that "medicine is a benevolent art" and that "being a family doctor means running on all legs – if one leg is broken, he will run on the other; if both legs are broken, he will run on his hands." Both novelist Sakaguchi and filmmaker Imamura are paying their respects to dedicated country doctors who fought against hepatitis by searching for a cure in their medical practices throughout the 1950s. Imamura also indirectly acknowledges Sakaguchi as "an extraordinary human being, a heavy drinker who lived an extravagant life, took sleeping pills and amphetamines." As is usual in Imamura's cinema, the writer-director focuses on outsiders
and outcasts, on those who live on the fringes of society and those driven
there in search of a last refuge. Among Dr Akagi's friends and supporters
are a degenerate monk (Jyuro Kara), a morphine-addicted surgeon (the late
novelist Sakaguchi was also a drug-addict), a bar owner, and the daughter
of a prostitute who applies for the position of nurse. Young Sonoko (Kumiko
Aso) is in love with the worn-out doctor, who refuses to capitulate to
the disease. Into this circle of dropouts comes a Dutch soldier (played
by French stage actor Jacques Gamblin), an escapee from a POW camp. There
is also a fishing scene which adds a surrealist aspect to a story as fantastic
in dramatic expression as it is realistic in theme. Indeed, Kanzo Sensei
is Shohei Imamura's most personal film – the one he apparently wants to
be remembered for in the future.
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