The Pornographers

1966 Japanese drama


Rating: 15/20


Plot: A maker of erotic films lives with a woman and her two children. He occasionally sleeps with the woman although she becomes increasingly paranoid when her late husband, reincarnated as a large fish she keeps in a tank beside her bed, gets antsy. The son's a jerk, and the fifteen-year-old daughter, who could somehow be the protagonist's daughter as well, is a whore with a drinking problem. Or a drinker with a whoring problem. Regardless, he develops sexual feelings for her. The mother gets sick, and then everybody in the world gets sick.


Interesting imagery--scenes shot through water and fish and odd-angled cinematography--keep this visually interesting even when the plot gets bloated and overly complex and really pretty dull. A large number of scenes are shot from the outside through cracks in the doors or windows. That got annoying after a while, but it does make the experience more voyeuristic and uncomfortable. Conversations between off-screen characters starting to watch a movie at the beginning (they ask, "What's that fish doing there?") and finishing at the end bookend the film. Like a perverse soap opera at times, this was filled with interesting moments but at times tried my patience. I wonder how shocking this would have been to Japanese audiences in '66 though? Good final scene.


In a former life, I was a pornographic fish: