Shohei Imamura’s 1960s primitivist epic is set on the fictional island of Kurage, a subtropical world whose inhabitants are engaged in a desperate struggle for survival, caught between faith in their traditional gods and the promises of modernity. Central to this drama are the Futori, the oldest and most primitive family on Kurage, with incestuous habits that have led to them being blamed for the drought strangling the island. They are digging a pit to appease the gods when an engineer arrives from Tokyo. His job is to build a well to get fresh water for a new sugar cane factory, but as he is thwarted by the environment and the islanders’ superstitions, this outrider for rationalism falls for the Futori daughter, Toriko, a sex-crazed half-wit, and briefly reverts to his animalistic true self before, inevitably, civilisation and capitalism win him back, and the island opens up to the forces of progress.
Profound Desires of the Gods is, as the original poster put it, “a miraculous drama of MAN and WOMAN, unfolding in a primitive society of gods and sexuality!” It’s an appetitive, seething world, driven by desire and savagery and self-preservation. The islanders are part of their landscape (unlike the sweaty engineer or, later, the tourists sightseeing from inside a new train), scrabbling around in the dirt without any understanding of what motivates their own actions. This lack of introspective acuity leads to obscure rites of self-punishment – the Futori father who doesn’t want to be released from his chains and pit – and to the conjuring up of a whole pantheon of blameable gods and spirits. The film itself is as messy as its subjects, a slow chaos that drags itself through its 173 minutes, near-hallucinating with the heat. It’s visceral, expressionistic, and has as imprecise a knowledge of the characters as they have of themselves, watching from a distance, just as it watches insects grubbing in the sand, the camera still and merciless as the sun beating down on their backs. There is no empathy with these individuals but instead an anthropological, even entomological, observing, a fixing under the camera, a sweeping away of realism and psychology to get at some essential, felt truth.
Despite the objectivity of the camera, Imamura does eventually take sides in the battle of the two cultures. The islanders’ animism and their shamanistic, ritualistic society (based on that of Okinawa, where the film was shot) seem, initially, nothing but the product of ignorant and superstitious minds, and a lie with which the naive are manipulated by the wily. But, as the film progresses, Imamura suggests that the beliefs are not baseless – Toriko is a true noro with visionary powers, a spirit appears in the sky, the dead haunt the present – but rather an expression of a deeper reality. Similarly, both the atavistic and the civilised seem distasteful, but it becomes clear that Imamura favours the Futoris. Even their incest, responsible for their ostracization and crazy daughter, is revealed to be a source of strength: the brother-sister relationships are redeeming; Nokito is stronger than the engineer, who allows himself to be shipped back to the mainland while she sits on the beach turning into rock, waiting for him to return. The Futoris are both ‘beasts’, as the other islanders call them, and fallen gods, descendants of the incestuous beings who, according to local legend, created Kurage; they are part of the essence of the place, an essence which is being tarmacked over by modernity.
This Blu-ray release includes a booklet of essays and interviews, and it’s clear from Imamura’s view of Japan and its place in the world that Kurage is meant to function as an allegory of the nation’s killing of its traditional gods, of Japan’s own burying of an original self as it Westernised and rationalised. But even if there’s a truth to be found in primitivism, even if these spirits and appetites do lurk within us, Imamura does not make them seem appealing; the viewer is left feeling it’s hardly surprising that they are suppressed.
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