Review of The Pornographers

Similar to THE INSECT WOMAN in that, apart from its emphasis on sexual perversions (all too clear from the title itself), it features multiple characters whose story (even less clear, and more convoluted, this time around!) unfolds over a number of years - but it's also a more accomplished movie overall, showing Imamura's growth as a film-maker when compared to the generally rough quality of his earlier picture. Once again, the director here equates human beings with insects: in fact, this movie's full title is THE PORNOGRAPHERS: INTRODUCTION TO ANTROPOLOGY! The "film-within-a-film" motif (a couple of the main characters getting together from time to time to watch the amateurish skin-flicks they've shot themselves) accentuates the picture's essential theme of voyeurism, all the while making the audience a knowing accomplice in it; the very last shot, then, suggesting that the film we've just watched has itself been a mere "projection", recalls a unique subplot found in Hiroshi Teshigahara's contemporaneous THE FACE OF ANOTHER (1966; which I've just viewed for the first time myself). Also notable is a hilarious scene involving a retarded girl whose lecherous, incestuous father tries to pass off as a porno actress and an equally amusing subplot in which the main character's wife believes her late first husband to have been reincarnated in a fish, and Imamura occasionally indulges us by showing the unfolding drama from its blurred perspective inside an aquarium!