‘Elegant Beast’ or — An Extraordinary Examination of Spatial, Social and Familial Units?
The Maeda family are a family of grifters, swindlers and embezzlers. They live in a brutalist apartment building opposite a U.S. air force base. Their rejection of societal norms means they must function as a cohesive unit out of necessity and when the son himself is scammed out of his money we get the chance to witness this tight solidarity in action.
‘Elegant Beast’s (1962) director, Yûzô Kawashima, was mentor to Shōhei Imamura and Kawashima’s influence on Imamura shows explicitly with both filmmakers focusing on subjects such as the American occupation of Japan, familial units existing on the fringes of society, the transactional nature of relationships, the place of women in Japanese life, sexuality, prostitution, the veneer of so-called civilised respectability and all executed with a pitch black sense of humour.
So the family’s embezzlement quickly becomes a microcosm of (if not an actual form of protection from) the various forms of embezzlement committed by modern society as a whole. This also allows us to judge the Maeda family less harshly with their crimes being viewed more as survival mechanisms as opposed to any form of moral weakness, another aspect Kawashima shares with Imamura.
Obviously this is a family at odds with their surrounding environment and Kawashima illustrates this by shooting their small apartment almost as an isolated module from the external world, a module mainly glimpsed through various apertures, chinks and perforations in a structure designed to keep everything else out. Again, like with Imamura, this suggests an incestuous family but less sexual in nature and more social.
The way Kawashima constantly finds new ways to fracture, fragment and compartmentalise this small space is both psychologically impactful and technically inventive (sometimes downright astonishing) with the director utilising both cinematic and theatrical devices to achieve this disorientating effect. It adds a feeling of claustrophobia, isolation and closeting; phenomena of modern existence.
The script was by Kaneto Shindō, the screenwriter and director who made the masterpieces ‘The Naked Island’ (1960), ‘Onibaba’ (1964) and ‘Kuroneko’ (1968), and his intelligent portrayal of women and female sexuality in a capitalist system is one of ‘Elegant Beast’s strongest elements.
The film’s satirical comedy (and this is a funny movie) adds to the wallop of it all with targets ranging from sexual and financial hypocrisy to U.S. militaristic and cultural domination (the initial embezzlement involves an Elvis Presley impersonator) and the de-humanising nature of the contemporary notion of ‘work’.
‘Elegant Beast’ is a remarkable film about a family you might start off despising but after the time you’ve spent in their company you could end up rooting for (I particularly liked the dad), although all selfish actions have consequences that ripple out across the medium within which we exist. We are, after all, fundamentally social creatures and cutting ourselves off from society is an impossibility. There will always be reverberations to our actions whether we like it or not. No wonder this is regarded as one of the classics of the Japanese New wave.
