Vibe
On a remote southern island, the taboo-bound Futori family collides with a Tokyo engineer and a modernization project. Imamura refuses to romanticize either indigenous custom or mainland development, building a mythic epic from desire, labor, belief and material change. The Futori family is at once the island’s scandal and its distorted mirror. Nekichi’s punishment for violating taboo, Toriko’s uninhibited desire and the family’s complicated kinship make them objects of communal judgment, yet Imamura never allows the surrounding society to claim moral purity. The engineer Kariya arrives with a different faith: development, measurement and mainland rationality. His assignment to investigate water for a sugar project seems practical, but it begins another cycle of intrusion into a landscape the islanders understand through myth, labor and inherited ritual. Imamura’s characteristic interest in instinct becomes unusually expansive here. Sexuality, hunger, labor and superstition are not separate topics; they are ways the community organizes survival. Animals and landscape participate in that structure. The tropical setting is lush but never presented as paradise, and the clash with modernization cannot be reduced to a simple defense of tradition. Old customs can be cruel, while development can be arrogant and extractive. The film’s great scale lets Imamura hold these contradictions without resolving them into a lesson about progress.
Watch for
- Watch Kariya’s engineering work as a competing belief system. Measurement and development are presented with their own assumptions, not as neutral truth arriving on the island.
- Notice how animals, vegetation and weather are cut alongside human behavior; Imamura repeatedly places instinct and social ritual inside a broader ecology.
- Track Nekichi’s imposed labor around the giant rock, where punishment, myth and physical work become inseparable.
- Use the CinemaScope frame actively: Imamura often sets crowded bodies and ritual behavior against landscapes that refuse to become passive scenery.
Production notes
JFDB lists a 175-minute 1968 Nikkatsu CinemaScope production. Nikkatsu describes it as Imamura's first color film and highlights the long Okinawa location shoot. The score is by Toshirō Mayuzumi. JFDB and Nikkatsu identify Profound Desires of the Gods as a 1968 Nikkatsu production running 175 minutes in CinemaScope. Imamura co-wrote with Keiji Hasebe, Toshirō Mayuzumi composed the music, and the cast includes Rantarō Mikuni, Chōichirō Kawarasaki, Kazuo Kitamura and Hideko Okiyama. Nikkatsu’s restoration program highlights two production facts that explain the movie’s unusual scale: it was Imamura’s first color feature and it involved an extended Okinawa location shoot. The color and widescreen format change the physical terms of Imamura’s cinema. Earlier films could compress social anthropology into cramped urban or rural environments; here the landscape itself becomes epic, placing human behavior against sea, rock, heat and vegetation. Nikkatsu’s recent digital restoration, shown in festival classic programs, has been particularly important for a film whose running time and visual scale made it harder to circulate than more compact Imamura titles. The restoration helps recover the work as a major production rather than a fascinating detour.
Trivia
- JFDB lists Profound Desires of the Gods at 175 minutes and dates its Japanese release to November 22, 1968.
- Nikkatsu identifies it as Imamura’s first color feature.
- Imamura co-wrote the film with Keiji Hasebe.
- Toshirō Mayuzumi composed the music.
- Nikkatsu’s digital restoration has screened in international classics programs, renewing access to the film’s large-scale color imagery.
Legacy
One of Imamura's largest and most ambitious films, crucial to his lifelong interest in marginal communities, instinct and modernization. Its restoration history has strengthened its international visibility. Profound Desires of the Gods occupies a central position in Imamura’s career because it is the point where his 1960s obsessions reach mythic scale. Later Palme d’Or victories can make the international story of his career seem to peak in the 1980s and 1990s, but this film demonstrates how ambitious his cinema already was before that recognition. Nikkatsu itself now presents the restoration as one of the director’s mythic masterpieces, emphasizing the continuity between its themes and those he pursued throughout his life. At #51, the film also ensures that modernization is represented from Japan’s geographic and cultural periphery. The Top 100 contains urban growth, industrial labor and middle-class family change; Imamura asks what “modern Japan” looks like when viewed from an island community whose beliefs and land use do not fit mainland assumptions. That historical function, combined with the sheer formal ambition of the color CinemaScope production, makes the film impossible to replace with another Imamura title.