Cast overview, first billed only: | |||
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Shôichi Ozawa | ... | Ogata(Subu) / Husband |
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Sumiko Sakamoto | ... | Haru / wife |
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Keiko Sagawa | ... | Keiko / Ogata's stepdaughter |
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Masaomi Kondô | ... | Koichi / Ogata's stepson |
Haruo Tanaka | ... | Banteki / Ogata's assistant | |
Ganjirô Nakamura | ... | Elderly Executive | |
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Chôchô Miyako | ... | Brothel Madame |
Kô Nishimura | ... | Sanada / Detective | |
Ichirô Sugai | ... | Shinun / Ogata's Father | |
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Shinichi Nakano | ... | Kabo / Ogata's workmate |
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Kazuo Kitamura | ... | Doctor |
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Asao Uchida | ||
Taiji Tonoyama | |||
Jun Hamamura | |||
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Kin Sugai |
Mr. Ogata lives a complicated life: he is a pornographer making two skin flicks per day and trying to stay beneath the radar screen of the local mob; he deeply loves his ailing wife Haru who's cursed by the restless spirit of her dead first husband; he also has a mistress, a step-son who wants to go to university, and a step-daughter entering adolescence. He lusts after his step-daughter, and when Haru finds out about those sexual advances, she asks him to marry the girl. Haru even signs over her business to him, and a crisis ensues when Ogata uses her nest egg to buy equipment so he and his pals can set up their own film processing lab. Surreal images and events weave their way into Ogata's life. Written by <jhailey@hotmail.com>
In The Pornographers, 1966, Shôhei Imamura manages to juggle intelligently with universal taboos (pornography, prostitution, incest, fetishism, orgies) challenging the viewer to think than just to consume the visual product by using minimum of nudity; the provocative situations are discretely suggested and not viscerally exposed, and it works because it is impossible to accuse of cheapness or exploitation such an interesting smart cinematographic approach on the subject of sex in a Japanese society full of contrasts, caught in-between the conservative ways of the past and the effervescence of the corrupt morals of the modern era; sex and money are the spinning wheels of the human convoy routing and sinking it into moral and physical decay; the film abounds in visual oddities, bizarre shooting angles providing its aesthetic a brisk geometry, intriguing spontaneous flashbacks, inspired touches of black comedy, and finds an equilibrate formula to wisely highlight subjects considered dirty and shameful in a very clean, frank, witty and somehow cheerful manner