Profound Desires of the Gods Review-By Michael Carlisle

Title: Profound Desires of the Gods
Year: 1968
Director: Shohei Imamura
Country: Japan
Language: Japanese 

From Akira Kurosawa to Yasujiro Ozu, Japanese Cinema has had a staggering amount of influential Directors and films. Pictures like Rashomon and Tokyo Story have become highly regarded as masterpieces by critics and cinephiles alike. The country's cinema has helped in influencing almost every prolific North American Director, including Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese. Shohei Imamura is also a much beloved Japanese director; perhaps his greatest work is Profound Desires of the Gods.

In this film, Tokyo engineer Kariya arrives on a primitive tropical island to drill a well to provide water for the sugar mill. He is assisted on the island by Kametaro, from the inbred Futori family. Nekichi Futori is chained in a pit that he has to dig, in order to appease the gods for breaking island customs. Nekichi is in love with his sister Uma, who is a shaman priestess at the sacred shrine, that contains the only good water close to the mill. She is also the mistress of Ryu, the manager of the mill. The patriarch of the Futori family tries to get the engineer to marry his retarded daughter Toriko.

Profound Desire of the Gods is one of Japan's most overlooked epics. Running at a somewhat long 173 minutes, it is an incredibly ambitious film that is filled with strange images that create a mythical atmosphere. Imamura spares no detail in portraying the odd Futori family and their desire to regain social status that they seemingly lost long ago. Unlike Kurosawa's epics, Imamura's film is far detached from Western Influence. To understand the motives of the characters in this film and their reactions to some social situations, one might want to read about Japanese Culture. 

Unfortunately this film wasn't a hit at the box office and it was filled with production problems from day one. It's quite lavish, but went wildly over budget and was considered a great failure at the time of its release. Imamura's production company Nikkatsu would refuse to make such an epic for a long time. Though that being said, Profound Desire of the Gods is a thoroughly engaging film which has themes that run quite deep. Imamura uses the film to explore Japan's relationship with the outside world, tradition vs modernism, the nature of man and religious hypocrisy. The film's cinematography is quite breathtaking, often showing us great landscapes. The score can be quite haunting and powerful.

In conclusion, Profound Desires of the Gods is a bizarre yet mythical film that has very few flaws, if any. Imamura's leisurely pace allow us to explore his strange world while still being entranced by the plot. While some epics feel like they are too long, this feels just right.  It's a very complex picture that demands multiple viewings, but the more one views it, the better it will get. Praise it! 5/5