The Whale God (1962)

directed by Tokuzō Tanaka

Japan

100 minutes

4 stars out of 5

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I tried watching this quite some time ago but couldn't make it through, I guess because it felt too long. But recently, thanks to it finally getting a good home media release, people have started talking about this movie again - and for good reason, because sitting down and mustering the energy to focus on this fairly demanding, but extremely rewarding film made me realize how much of an underrated gem it is.

This is a movie about a whaling village driven collectively to madness by their repeated failure to catch and kill an abnormally large whale which they've taken to naming the "Whale God" (kujira-gami; it's more or less a literal translation, but there are subtleties to the word "kami"/"gami" that I encourage you to look into). From an outside perspective, it's easy to balk at that runtime given the simplicity of the plot - "Movie about a whale, 100 minutes" - but there's so much that goes into the story that it makes those 100 minutes feel expertly utilized.

Most of the first half of the movie deals with establishing individual characters and developing conflicts between them. One thing that's interesting about this is that the presence of so many extras and various background actors in every scene gives the characters who are focused on more of a sense of just being random members of the village. They're not - one of the leads is the son of the village's best spearman, and other prominent figures such as the village elder and his daughter come into play - but there's none of that feeling of the movie being full of random nobodies and then a couple of famous actors that you might get in a Hollywood film with a similar setting. Not that the actors in the forefront are nobodies: we have Kōjirō Hongō (Gamera, reluctantly), Shintarō Katsu (Zatoichi), and Takashi Shimura (everything), as well as Shiho Fujimura in a smaller role, who is not immediately recognizable but had a career playing various supporting female characters in many famous films. But these more familiar faces are blended really well into the overall atmosphere of the village so that everybody feels like they're on even ground.

I want to take a second to talk about Katsu's performance in specific because he's really great here. His character, Kishu (this I think was less of a name and more just a nickname based on where he says he came from) is an outsider whose only goal is to make money off the Whale God. The village elder promises his home, title, and his daughter's hand in marriage to whoever can kill the whale. Not only does Kishu have his sights set on all of this, but he openly brags that he won't be satisfied there; he'll sell the daughter to a brothel and continue making money off of his kill. Katsu in this role exudes a malevolence, a total lack of conscience. He has an unsettling and domineering physicality to him that makes for a real contrast with his role as Ichi. Kishu plays off of Hongō's character, Shaki, in very interesting ways; had I the time to do so, I would want to go on at further length about how deeply homoerotic the fight scene between the two of them felt, but I'll leave that thought in my brain for now.

An element of this movie that I think is absolutely fascinating but remains subtle is the fact that this whaling village is either undergoing or has already undergone Christianization. A white Christian priest has a church in the village, and when Shaki adopts the child his girlfriend Ei has after Kishu rapes her, they have the baby baptized in the church. Although the backdrop of Christianity is there, the villagers nonetheless continue to conceptualize the whale as a kami, and this is never shown as being in conflict with the growth of Christianity in the village. Indeed, traditional religion seems to take precedence over Christianity when it really matters - although the priest is against it, the villagers move the dying Shaki to where he can converse with the remains of the whale in his last days. 

There is an implication here that, with Shaki and Ei's child, the future of the village and its traditional animistic religion is uncertain. The killing of the Whale God could be an element of this. With the death of the whale there is now one less god in the world - a trivial thing, perhaps, when your worldview holds that every single object and animal is inhabited by its own god - but the presence of a new God begins to take shape. The villagers' collective rage and hatred towards the whale swells to such an all-consuming height that one cannot help but begin to wonder if there's something else underneath it.

An incredibly dark, at times somewhat slow-paced film, The Whale God is capped off by twenty or so minutes of total practical effects insanity. Both Hongō and Katsu spend the latter part of the film on top of the whale (sorry, Raúl Ruiz fans, pun intended) in a protracted sequence that looked absolutely miserable to film but extremely compelling. The whale is very realistic, but what really cinches it is the performance both actors give while attempting to ring the whale's nose and bring it to shore to be killed. It's totally believable, as is everything else about the film. Akira Ifukube's inimitable score, Kaneto Shindo's screenplay, Tokuzō Tanaka's direction, and the myriad of impressive acting skills on display here all work together to create a film of rare caliber.