The Eel

Yamashita, who killed his wife after catching her with a lover, serves eight years and comes out on parole. He opens a barber shop in a small town, and his only friend is an eel he kept in prison and brought with him. Then he finds a woman by the river who has tried to kill herself. The film is not interested in the murder. It is interested in returning to being human: Yamashita speaks to nobody, only to the fish, and the film slowly pushes him among other people. The townspeople know what he did and pretend not to. The form is calm and intermittently strange: the river, the shop, night scenes and passages that briefly leave reality. Imamura inserts humour at the most serious moment. Shōhei Imamura directed, from a story by Akira Yoshimura. The film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1997, sharing it with Abbas Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry, making Imamura one of the directors to take the prize twice. Koji Yakusho plays Yamashita and Misa Shimizu the woman. Who it is for: viewers who like Japanese cinema and quiet films about life after a crime. Who it is not for: anyone who cannot take the harshness of the opening murder. The film is very direct at the start and then changes tone completely.