Intentions of Murder (1964)

Shōhei Imamura is a director who consistently orients his films around suffering in the underclass. With Intentions of Murder, we see him turn his lens towards the world of women in a highly volatile and patriarchal society. Our main character, Sadako, flounders in a world practically designed to ensure her misery. Her common-law husband cheats on her while forcing her to raise his child from another marriage. Her mother-in-law consistently torments her with the mistakes of her grandmother, the woman who is seen as the one to have cursed the family. With one fell swoop, we see how she is shackled by the burdens of a system that has existed long before her, chaining her to others’ mistakes. She is destined to live out punishment she has no business bearing.

The worst of her intense and grueling existence starts to manifest through a volatile intruder who attempts to rob her. Hiraoka, a violent man with a weak heart, enters her life at first looking to rob her financially. In a harrowing sequence, we watch as robbery turns to sexual assault. The use of lighting from a single source paints a dim cave where this pathetic behavior plays out. Imamura is emotionally intelligent enough to never justify the actions of these people. Even our robber, Hiraoka, sheds a tear looking at what he’s done. The ugly nature of his actions are unbearable even to his own internal morality.

What separates Imamura from most male directors is his emotional intelligence with these scenes. We are never made to believe, correctly, that Sadako is responsible for any of this. This is not a reality where someone like her gets to make choices about her body, mind, and soul. As her mother-in-law states in the later half of the film, “I want to die in my house and be a burden to nobody.” These words ring out with a vicious acceptance, the harrowing realization that many of these women are destined to suffer at the whims of their social hierarchy designed by the very men who claim themselves to be shackled. We see an image throughout the first half of the film as Sadako contemplates suicide. It’s an image even the title hangs over—a subtle, nihilistic image that permeates the grueling atmosphere of the entire picture: a white hamster runs in his wheel at a consistently  intense speed. At first, we wonder what this will come to mean. By the end of  the film, it signals the plight of Sadako and the many women before her: that innocent people are forever destined to be tormented by the ego of men and their desires. The final shot of Sadako letting the caterpillar run up her  leg feels less like liberation… and plays more like a pyrrhic victory.