The facts of the case are shocking enough. In 1964 a man named Iwao Enokizu was arrested after having been on the lam across Japan for several months, swindling, cheating, and murdering whoever crossed his path. He was snidely unremorseful, and on the way to the precinct house he complained that all his arresting officers would outlive him and deny him any chance to further enjoy his life. He sounded like a man who had been cheated out of something, and in his mind, he had been. Society for him, as for all sociopaths, was a big fat obstacle in the way of his pleasures.
But soon he began to talk, and talk, and talk, and before long the police were in possession of his whole sordid story. What they did not have, however, were motives. What possessed a man — undeniably bad to begin with, but hardly irredeemable — to murder his coworkers, rob them, do a runner, and then kill everyone else who got in his way?
Vengeance Is Mine, directed by Shohei Imamura, opens with Iwao's arrest and capture, and flashes back over the course of his confession to his crimes. No attempt at suspense is generated here; the only mystery Imamura wants on screen is the mystery of his main character's motives. Unlike the police who interrogate Iwao, however, Imamura doesn't claim to have any answers. This is not a vest-pocket psychoanalysis movie where everything is wrapped up in neat, Freudian terms, even though we see a great deal of material that could fuel such a theory. The movie doesn't put its credence one way or another. It simply shows a charming and utterly hateful sociopath at work, and presumes that we will be intelligent or observant enough to draw our own conclusions.
After killing his co-workers, Iwao flees and hides out as a professor, scamming and stealing.
Iwao is played by Ken Ogata, a remarkable actor whom I have encountered before (Mishima). He plays a wholly different person here, someone who does not so much seem to be possessed by something as he is simply settling easily into a role he has always wanted to play. He enjoys his "work." It isn't something that seems to take hold of him like an illness; it flows naturally from him, and is all the more ghastly for that reason. One of the very first scenes in the film features him murdering his co-workers — dispassionately, almost distractedly. Imamura even shows him urinating on his hands to wash off the blood: again, so matter-of-fact, he seems to regard his own body as a mere instrument.
We see Iwao as a young man living with his parents (Rentaro Mikuni plays his father in the movie's other outstanding performance), attempting to protect his father from what he sees as a slight to his honor. His father caves in to pressure by the navy to sell off some of his fishing fleet to them, and Iwao apparently concludes this is due to the older man's Catholicism. If Catholicism, or virtue, equals moral cowardice (or so he seems to think), the only way to be really upstanding and true to one's self is to reject everything it stands for. He does. He impregnates and marries a young woman (Mitsuko Baisho), not out of love, but out of a tiresome sense of the consequences if he doesn't. The scene with him bringing the girl to his parents is agonizing; the girl discovers, all to late, that she is simply a way for him to rub his behavior in their faces.
Iwao's father makes advances on his wife, while his mother continues to coddle him.
Iwao spends time in prison for fraud, and upon his release gets into a savage fight with his wife for being untrue to him. Everything that happens simply increases his sense of being owed something by the world, and when the world doesn't pay up, he simply goes and takes it. After he kills his co-workers and goes on the lam, he assumes the identity of a professor and hides out in a resort. Imamura gives us a remarkable unbroken shot of him entering the hotel and meeting the brothel madam and her mother, who jointly own the place. They have a relationship that is at least as disturbed as anything he has had, and he finds to his combined astonishment and delight that the madam has taken a shine to him. Where this leads, I will not say, but it has the horrible, cold finality of real life and not the creaky behavior of fiction.
The detectives fitting together the mosaic of his murder spree find a great many more bits and pieces, but they all seem to point towards the same thing — a man who is simply an empty shell. His mistress describes his ravening sexual appetite. His wife describes his philandering. He himself admits everything, but what of it? There's nothing left to be done with him, it seems, but have him destroyed. "You will never understand me," Iwao insists to his father, in their last meeting together. "We have nothing in common." What Imamura leaves to us to decide is how alike they actually are, as he shows the father making advances on Iwao's wife while he's in prison, among other things. Everyone in the movie seems to be seething with barely repressed vice; Iwao is simply being more forthright with his vices. Never mind that it's at the expense of everyone around him.
The stress of being a fugitive takes its toll on Iwao's psyche.
The movie is played deadly straight. There's no attempt to make this material into an exercise in style or black humor. This is wise, because a great deal of what we see is simply too shameful, in a way, to treat in that fashion. Towards the end of the movie, there is a sequence where Iwao's face has been plastered all over town on WANTED posters, and yet somehow people choose not to notice him because, as they rationalize out loud, it couldn't be him. Then Iwao and his lover visit a movie theater, see a newsreel that features him, and collapse against each other. She doesn't believe it, either. He's too nice to her to be a killer.
Imamura is one of Japan's most interesting directors, although he has lately made a great many movies that I simply found inexplicable or not to my taste. The Eel was dreadfully, inexplicably bad, both as allegory and as straight drama; Warm Water Under a Red Bridge I may never figure out. But Black Rain and Dr. Akagi were both excellent, and in Vengeance Is Mine he takes on a slippery subject, the banality of evil, and comes away with a memorable and appropriately bleak film.
Even in death Iwao is unrepentant, and Imamura suggests that to ask otherwise is foolish.
The last scene of the film (and skip this if you don't want to know about it) is masterful. Iwao's father and mother take Iwao's remains to the top of a mountain and attempt to throw them off. Every time they do so, Imamura freezes the image. Again and again, they try to rid themselves of Iwao, and are thwarted. They can throw away his bones, they can dispose of his memory, but Imamura knows better. If we are all capable of evil, he seems to be saying, then ridding ourselves of him only removes a symptom of evil. He will never really be gone. His crimes stand. Vengeance is his.
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