Profound Desires of the Gods

An engineer is sent from Tokyo to a small southern island to find a water source. The Futori family lives there: buried in debt, shunned by their neighbours, and in breach of the island's rules through the relationships inside the household. The engineer enters their world and lives out the distance between modern Japan and the island himself. Shohei Imamura's film runs close to three hours and was shot over eighteen months, a production that nearly finished the director. The island's mythology, the prohibition on incest and the arrival of a sugar cane factory advance inside the same story, because tradition and exploitation feed from the same source here. It failed commercially, and Imamura afterwards moved away from fiction for a long stretch and worked in documentary. The difficulty: it is very long, the narrative is scattered, and some passages about sex and taboo are shown directly. Who it is for: viewers curious about the most ambitious work in Japanese cinema. Who it is not for: anyone wanting something short and orderly.