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“ [One] of my favourite Japanese films of all time. . . . A pitch-perfect film noir . . . Very, very dark but very funny” ( Kaiju Shakedown ). ENDLESS DESIRE is the film in which Imamura became Imamura, a superb black comedy about lust, greed, and deceit in postwar Japan that offers a cast who are prototypes for his later films, including the first of his ruthlessly determined women. (It is also the first of his films shot by Shinsaku Himeda, master of the Scope frame, whom Imamura used for much of his subsequent work.) On the tenth anniversary of Japan's capitulation to the Allies, five people descend upon the basement of a butcher shop that was an American air-raid shelter during the war. There to dig up a cache of morphine are the ferocious widow of the man who buried it, the owner of a Chinese restaurant, a gangster, a pharmacist, and a junior high school teacher. Double-crosses, sexual intrigue, and a mass poisoning lead to an ironic denouement that kills off not only several of the characters, but also a river of fish. Desire might be endless, but death is eternal.
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