This complex and beautiful film is built on correspondences and contrasts; between landscape and society, man and nature, between passive and active, death and life, sanity and madness, the repressed and the unbridled, sexuality and abstinence, comedy and tragedy, alienation and redemption. The many strands to these themes are woven together in a complex pattern that defies complete analysis. Yet 'The Eel' is well-paced and is easy to watch and enjoy.<br /><br />The film is set in Japan, that most self-disciplined and compliant of countries, and it is the limits, and limitations, of conformity and control that are explored. Behaviour is checked, emotions kept inward; yet when people look inward they find a seething that terrifies.<br /><br />The landscape here is a damp, featureless, washed-out coastland, exquisitely shot in a subdued palette that embodies the film's subject. The people, too, are generally quiet, gentle, good citizens. Yet violence and disturbance erupt into their lives as norms are broken: a woman makes love, intensely, exultantly, adulterously. Her husband discovers her and stabs her to death in the very act. After eight years in prison Yamashita is released on parole, alienated and withdrawn, and, accompanied by his eel companion, opens a barber's shop. He finds Keiko, unconscious after a suicide attempt, and she begins to work for him. She, too, is on conditional release, from her crazy mother and unpleasant extortionist boyfriend. There is an immediate sympathy between Yamashita and Keiko, a sympathy that he, especially, cannot bring himself to express, driven to repression and passivity by his guilt and fear.<br /><br />Each of these principal characters correspond with other characters in the film, providing a network of symmetry and contrast. Thus, Yamashita's failure to express his yearning for Keiko is set against Dojima's earlier lovemaking with her, and a fellow ex-convict's attempted rape. The ex-con haunts Yamashita, taunting him with his weaknesses, until he is transformed into a phantasm of Yamashita's imagination. Yamashita's wife's affair, too, finds resonance in Keiko's sensuality - and in both women's determination to provide a lunch box whenever Yamashita goes fishing. At the end, the man volunteers to assume paternity of Keiko's unborn child by Dojima.<br /><br />Attempts by minor characters in the film to reach out beyond febrile compliance and quietism provide humour but little comfort: Keiko's mother's Spanish dancing is but a manifestation of her madness, and Yamashita's friend seeks only the unattainable and absurd, in his obsession with contacting UFOs. The moments of irony and humour are generally introduced with a light touch, but the transition is less satisfactory in the climactic fight at the barber's shop. This crucial moment in the film, when Yamashita fights Dojima and his thugs, against her past and his, is filmed as slapstick; the humour in unnerving.<br /><br />In the end there is redemption, but the contrast of the conventional with the unruly is resolved, once more, quietly, almost submissively. Yamashita, his parole broken, returns to gaol for a year; Keiko waits for the birth of her child and Yamashita's release. Harmony is restored - on the surface. The eel, at last, is released.<br /><br />'The Eel' is a subtle and complex film, with a succession of images that require more than one viewing and more than this brief note to tease out. But doing so will be a rewarding experience. Imamura's film is strong and subtle, warm yet critical. It will reward many viewings.