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Cinephile extraordinaire Bertrand Tavernier lists PROFOUND DESIRE OF THE GODS as one of his three favourite Japanese films, Cahiers du cinéma as Imamura's masterpiece, and Jonathan Demme as one of the ten greatest films in the history of cinema. Imamura's first film in colour, an epic shot in Scope, DESIRE has an almost hallucinatory lushness. An engineer sent to a remote island to build a sugar factory encounters a primitive society which, according to myth, was the founding source of the Japanese people. The islanders regard him, with his gadgets and Coca-Cola, as a god and present him with a sexually uninhibited young woman who is the product of two generations of incest. The finale is one of the most debated and celebrated in all of Imamura's work. Crazed and strange, DESIRE achieves “a genuine grandeur” (Dave Kehr) in its portrayal of the conflict between the modern and the primitive, technology and tradition, the “official” and “real” Japan. “A haunting sensuous experience. The flight of the lovers at the end is one of cinema's most beautiful sequences” (Edinburgh International Film Festival). “One of Imamura's greatest films” (Toichi Nakata).
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