The Insect Woman

From the muddy fields and barns of rural Japan in 1918 to the cramped factories and brothels of 1950s Tokyo, Imamura surveys vast swathes of Japanese working life as he sweeps through the underbelly of the twentieth century. At the centre of this century of perpetual change and social upheaval sits the quintessential Imamura protagonist, Tomé, a woman with an irrepressible will to survive whose life seems to be eternally defined by privation, lust and tragedy.

If Pigs and Battleships was the first of Imamura’s films that was truly his own, then The Insect Woman represented a further evolution of his work, as he abandons the conventional plotting of his previous films for something decidedly more elliptical, where decades pass shot by shot and resolutions are nowhere to be found. Anchored by an astonishing performance from Sachiko Hidari and lauded for its immaculate deep focus staging, Imamura’s frames teem and overflow with boiling pots, billowing cigarette smoke, and restless bodies, revealing that life’s great tragedies spring forth in well-stocked kitchens, ramshackle barns, and cheap brothels alike.

With The Insect Woman, Imamura seems to be channeling something of Zola’s totemic study of family genealogy and its potential for diagnosing the ills of a nation and its character, as he finally realises the kind of messy irrepressible epic that he’d been imagining from the very beginning. An unsparing dissection of the generational impact of poverty and abuse, where self-destructive behaviours are passed on like genetic code, and Tomé like her mother before her and her daughter after her, relentlessly climbs toward her destiny even as the soil beneath her feet gives way in warning.

The Insect Woman (にっぽん昆虫記), dir. Shōhei Imamura, Japan 1963, Japanese with English subtitles, 123 min.