Kamigami no fukaki yokubô (1968)

Kamigami no fukaki yokubô (1968). Kamigami no fukaki yokubô: Directed by Shôhei Imamura. With Rentarô Mikuni, Chôichirô Kawarasaki, Hideko Okiyama, Kanjûrô Arashi. An engineer from Tokyo arrives on a drought-ridden tropical island to drill a well to power a nearby sugar mill. He meets the inbred Futori family, hated by the locals for breaking religious customs.

“Profound Desires of the Gods, sometimes referred to as Imamurau0026#39;s overlooked epic, is an ambitious undertaking. Running at a daunting 173 minutes, it is ostensibly the tale of one inbred Ryukyu familyu0026#39;s (the Futoris) attempts to regain lost social status. They do this by digging a pit to bury a huge boulder, and by seducing a mainland engineer with the feral, sexually-charged wild-child daughter. On another level, the film interrogates issues of modernity versus tradition, religious hypocrisy, and Japanu0026#39;s troubled relations with the outside world.u003cbr/u003eu003cbr/u003eThe filmu0026#39;s successes are its luscious landscape, evocative production design of heathen and pagan rituals and artifacts, and portrayal of suppressed, taboo desires bursting to the fore. The narrative wanders and explores various tangents that can challenge the attention. This is filmmaking for cinema, and the gorgeous golden beaches and turquoise oceans had me longing to see this on the big screen. A murder by masked men at the end is also visually compelling. This film is interesting in bits, and flashes of genius occasionally show themselves, but the lack of coherence, repetition in the storyline, and outright dud moments (the heavenly vision of the departed patriarch), make this a problematic addition to the Imamura oeuvre. It hints at the great film that this project could have become, a realization of the potential of the vision, rather than the vision itself. Sometimes amazing, sometimes disappointing, this is one to watch and argue over.”