Vengeance Is Mine is an odd rebellious film. It's a film designed to break the mold of the classic Ozu style and while it's interesting, it does leave some meaning to be desired. I'd always been intrigued in this for a raw and meaningful vengeance film but it seems to just be raw but by god is it raw. It switches between being cinematic to a documentary style often, both being very effective, but its rugged structure means it jumps around far too much. By the time I'm finally invested in a scene and figured out what's going on it skips ahead or back to something else. It's a fascinating film with its unconventionally unsympathetic protagonist but it does sometimes get too frustrating to follow. 7/10

Yes, the Japanese can have serial killers too, and they can make movies about them, and this is one powerful movie. In its technique, it comes closer to "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer" in its episodic and somewhat rambling narrative than to any of the dozens of other American junk being ground out about Ed Gein the Butcher or "Ted Bundy." The serial murderer, a real one, is Iwao Inokizu, played with intensity and charm by Ken Ogata, who passed away a few months ago. There are some discontinuities in the narrative that may make this rather long story a little hard to follow, perhaps especially for Westerners. Iwao's first two murders are both pointless and bloody. Of the remaining three, only one takes place on screen and is relatively brief. And the story is told in flashbacks, with sudden shifts from place to place, and only a handful of characters to serve as anchors in time and space.Man, have the writers got Antisocial Personality Disorder down pat. They illustrate the condition as well as Iwao exemplified it. Iwao kills people -- five all together, matching Jack the Ripper -- for virtually no reason. He poses as a lawyer or a distinguished professor. He moves from city to city relentlessly and cons people out of money with his authoritative charm.The movie is mature. It's made for grown-ups, not children. And not because of any sensationalism. That would be targeting thrill-starved teens of today. But rather because of the absence of sensationalism. It's hard to describe a film about a serial killer as showing a sense of taste but this one does. When Iwao forms a bond with an elderly woman whom he considers his "prison buddy" because she's been in jail, he decides to strangle her. When she walks unwittingly into a darkened room, we see him enter behind her with a rope. And that's it. Cut. It reminds me of the scene in Val Lewton's "The Body Snatchers" when the young girl who sings carols is murdered off screen.Iwao's family were devout Catholics, so much so that when Iwao's father develops impure thoughts about Iwao's wife he asks to be excommunicated. And the family insist that before Iwao is married, his bride convert from Buddhism. This came as a bit of a surprise because in much of Japan religion, although taken seriously, isn't so readily and so intensely divided into sects and denominations. A Shinto shrine at home is in no way incompatible with a Christian wedding and a Buddhist funeral ceremony.There is a scene at the end in which Iwao's father and the daughter-in-law whom he loves, and who loves him, dispose of Iwao's bones after the hanging by flinging them from an isolated hill top. The bones seem to freeze in mid-air. I take this to be not director Imamura's endorsement of anything supernatural, just the symbolic perceptions of Iwao's family. He was so thoroughly rotten, and blood is blood, that it's not easy to get rid of him even after he's dead. The scene is probably more easily understood in Japan, where family honor and shame are considerations to be seriously reckoned with.It's a lengthy film and at times a little confusing, but it packs a real wallop.

Not as brutal as "Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer", but not as sophisticated as "The Talented Mr. Ripley". Vengeance is Mine is the story of a con man, thief, and murderer (not serial killer, there's nothing ritual about any of it), during 78 day manhunt to find him. The film also shows moments from Enokizu's youth, and has two sub-plots one about his Catholic father and wife, resisting their attraction to each other, the other about a mother and daughter who run a brothel, where Enokizu' sometimes stays.Criterion Collection DVD came with an interview with the directer where he says his only interest in films are people, there no nature shots in his films, every frame has human actions. His interests are not moral, he's interested his characters feelings, thoughts, sex lives, their everyday habits, but that's it.No cop hot on the trail, no great explanation for how he has come to this (Why so serious?), no guilty confession. It's a character driven story about a sociopath, at times charming, at others brutish, and still others pent up and pathetic (the final father son scene).Any very intense, unlikely humanistic, well made film. Not sure I would watch it again, but worth seeing once.

Shohei Imamura's multi award winning film Vengeance is Mine follows after the dismal performance of The Profound Desire of the Gods, this time being a film that is more accessible. Based on a novel which follows the life of crime of real-life criminal Iwao Enokizu (played by Ken Ogata), at one time the most wanted man in Japan for his series of murders, this was probably my favourite movie today, until I watched Imamura's Palme d'Or winner Ballad of Narayama.It's no surprise that this is something more conventional, given that it plays out narratively in retrospect, and that audiences sure like something that is based on real life. I thought it unfurled similarly to Catch Me If You Can, except that while Frank Abignale Jr was once a conman, defrauding banking institutions and adopting various identities, Iwao Enokizu was a killer first, and conman second, assuming identities to obtain cash for basic necessities, and for pleasurable moments to satisfy his lust for flesh.The story seeks to discover his motivation and rationale for a life in crime, and goes way back to when Enokizu was a child, and hating his father for being weak in standing up against oppressors (in truth, there is little he can actually do except to lose his life if he doesn't comply). Hatred also bred deeper when his father is a religious hypocrite, obviously sinning against Enokizu with the lust for his wife Kazuko (Mitsuko Baisho, who's a dead ringer for Hong Kong actress Cherie Chung), and strangely enough, for Kazuko to fall heads over heals for the old man too. This father-son dynamics, like in Catch Me If You Can, pops up now and then through the story to remind you of the beginnings of the feud, except that there is absolutely no love between the two of them.I thought Ken Ogata is enigmatic on screen, with his crazed antics as the killer on the loose, and his suave demeanour when posing as a professor and a lawyer. There's this mean streak within that glint in the eye, and surely, this is one man you definitely would not want to cross. For the most parts of the story, it deals with the love between his Enokizu and an inn manager Haru (Mayumi Ogawa), who falls in love with devotion of blind faith, and the happenings within the confines of that inn. What I thought was a bit difficult to sit through though, was the violence against women in the movie, with the constant slapping across the cheek (and I notice this too in the other Imamura films), and some included rape.But the theme that took the cake was the one on religious hypocrisy as personified by Enokizu's father Shizuo (Rentaro Mikuni), and really, this is the kind of dads, or persons that you'll love to hate. Preaching something and practicing another, you wonder whether Enokizu would seek him out for revenge, since it seemed like Shizuo was indeed Iwao's most hated person on earth, rather than work on his victims by chance.Vengeance of Mine is full of nudity, sex and gratuitous violence, which gave it an R21 rating for today's uncut screening. Simple to follow, and definitely enjoyable by fans who have a preference for true life crime stories. Some of the actors here become familiar faces when they get casted again in the next movie, Ballad of Narayama, and I thought Vengeance was a nice way of introducing those actors to us first.