Vibe
Intentions of Murder centers Sadako, a woman treated by her household and social environment as intellectually and sexually inferior, then refuses every expectation about how her victimization should define her. After a home intruder assaults her, the film does not organize itself around respectable recovery or simple revenge. Sadako’s responses are contradictory, bodily, strategic, frightened, and increasingly self-determined. Imamura fills the film with flashbacks, dreams, family history, appetite, illness, sex, domestic labor, and competing systems of classification. Her common-law husband Riichi sees himself as educated and rational, yet his orderly worldview depends on controlling Sadako and denying her status. Criterion’s James Quandt points to Riichi reading Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization as a telling detail: “official” intellectual culture is associated with a man whose behavior is deeply coercive, while Sadako’s supposedly primitive instincts become sources of survival. Imamura’s widescreen black-and-white compositions make the household a field of bodily and social pressure rather than a neutral domestic setting.
Watch for
- Watch how flashbacks and dreams interrupt linear causality. Imamura treats Sadako’s present as inseparable from family history, inherited stigma, fear, and bodily memory.
- Notice the contrast between Riichi’s ordered professional identity and the disorder he attributes to Sadako. The film repeatedly exposes “rational” authority as a form of self-serving hierarchy.
- Pay attention to food, illness, sex, sleep, cold, and domestic work. Imamura builds character through bodily processes that more genteel social dramas might treat as beneath notice.
- Track Sadako’s changing relation to the intruder. The film refuses a morally comfortable psychology, making her survival strategy difficult to fit into categories of victim, lover, or avenger.
Production notes
Criterion identifies Intentions of Murder as a 1964, 150-minute, black-and-white film in 2.35:1, written by Imamura and Keiji Hasebe from a story by Shinji Fujiwara. Cinematography is by Shinsaku Himeda and music by Toshiro Mayuzumi. Imamura’s wide frame is significant because his visual world is crowded with domestic objects, relatives, bodies, animals, and social evidence; Sadako is never psychologically abstracted from material surroundings. Criterion also preserves a conversation between Imamura and critic Tadao Sato, making the release a valuable research source for authorial and critical context. The film belongs to Imamura’s great 1960s run, when he turned away from the polished self-image of modern Japan toward people and instincts he believed official culture suppressed. Intentions of Murder is one of the fullest expressions of that project because its protagonist’s survival becomes a direct challenge to the categories imposed on her.
Trivia
- Criterion lists the film at 150 minutes in the unusually wide 2.35:1 ratio, giving Imamura substantial horizontal space for domestic and social staging.
- The screenplay is credited to Shōhei Imamura and Keiji Hasebe, based on a story by Shinji Fujiwara.
- Cinematographer Shinsaku Himeda and composer Toshiro Mayuzumi are among the major collaborators credited by Criterion.
- A visible copy of Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization appears in the film; Criterion essayist James Quandt uses the detail to unpack Imamura’s critique of official rational culture.
- Kinema Junpo’s 1999 filmmakers’ poll ranked Intentions of Murder #7, and the 2009 all-time poll ranked it #18.
Legacy
Intentions of Murder is another film whose domestic status substantially exceeds its international familiarity. Its high Kinema Junpo placement demonstrates the importance of Imamura within Japanese critical memory, while its focus on Sadako complicates older auteur summaries that describe Imamura chiefly as an anthropologist of lower-class behavior. The film is not observing her from a safe distance; its form continually destabilizes the categories through which men, family, and social institutions define her. That makes it historically important to discussions of gender as well as postwar modernity. At #19, it gives Imamura a Top 20 position without relying on his later Palme d’Or winners, emphasizing instead the 1960s period when his formal and social project was at its most radical. Its endurance lies in its refusal to make liberation clean, respectable, or psychologically tidy. Sadako’s endurance is therefore political without becoming exemplary; Imamura lets survival remain compromised, bodily and resistant to the respectable identities offered to her.