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Audience Member
Shohei Imamura's gleefully original gangster flick charts the burgeoning immaturity of a young hoodlum in US-occupied postwar Japan.
The film contrasts simplistic, sarcastic comedy with evocative small-time tragedy, through a quick-fire episodic structure that lets narrative days drop dead in cinematic minutes.
Postwar tensions and the bizarre mutually exploitative relationships between the Japanese and their occupiers make for eye-opening background music. But ultimately, the historical context takes a back seat to pig stampedes, swirling rape sequences and desperate liaisons, as Imamura invites us to take a tragicomic look at the lower end of the war's collateral damage scale.
The result is a touching, truly unique portrait of a torn working class, exhibited through a Western-inspired plot which is astutely balanced in terms of surprise and convention and universally accessible and engaging for any viewer.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
02/14/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Imamura's films are hard to predict; from my limited exposure to him, it seems that he doesn't use genre (or formula) as a starting place for his films. Pigs and Battleships was his first big hit and it is a savage comedic look at a post-war Japanese seaside town located adjacent to an American naval base (Yokosuka). We follow an odd gang of chimpira (junior yakuza) who arrange a deal with a Japanese-American from Hawaii to buy food scraps from the base to support a pig farm (since pork prices are rising). The unlucky loser among this bunch, Kinta, has a girlfriend who wishes to break away from the town and its symbiotic relationship with the Americans. I say symbiotic instead of parasitic because Imamura is clear that it is the Americans that are exploiting and corrupting the Japanese (who may be willing participants, he suggests); in fact, the Americans are uniformly treated as brutal lugs here, seen mostly in brothels. Gradually the film focuses in on Kinta and Haruko and their fate. We hope they escape - but in an Imamura film, you never can be sure.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/04/23
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Audience Member
Lots of Pigs. Light on Battleships.
Rated 3.5/5 Stars •
Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars
02/09/23
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Audience Member
I very comical yet dramatic film about lower class Japanese and the Yakuza after World War II. This film is very entertaining. I highly recommend it.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/13/23
Full Review
Audience Member
The most energetic film I've seen in quite a long time, combining a quite specific place and time with brash, vivid characters.
Rated 4.5/5 Stars •
Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars
02/20/23
Full Review
eric b
"Pigs and Battleships" is surprisingly entertaining and accessible, compared with other films of the Japanese New Wave. Lead actor Hiroyuki Nagato is such a marvel of hyperactive energy that I kept imagining an American remake starring Jerry Lewis.
The setting is the seaside town of Yokosuka, where all the action centers on the interplay between locals and visiting American sailors. Director Shohei Imamura mixes location shoots and studio sets to create a chintzy, carnival-like atmosphere of flashing lights, narrow streets and tourist-trap shops. Prostitutes and organized crime also maneuver in the open, and the neighborhood Yakuza depends on pimping to help fund its larger enterprise: pig farming. This polluted blend of legal and illegal business is not so far from a similar scenario in Imamura's later film "The Pornographers." Nagato's ladder-climbing character is in charge of keeping the pigs fed, but he's a lightweight compared to the fearsome operators who employ him. He's in over his head, and his wary girlfriend Haruko knows it.
Satire runs rampant, and so do the pigs -- the climactic stampede is an unforgettable image.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
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