Stop me if you've heard this one before: a rag-tag group of criminals join together to seek a hidden, underground treasure by tunneling towards it from an adjacent building while posing as mild-mannered locals. No...I am not referring to the legendary Ealing Studios comedy The Ladykillers (1955). Instead, I am talking about Shohei Imamura's third film, Endless Desire. Much like its British counterpart, Endless Desire is a comedy about a crime caper gone terribly, terribly wrong. The doomed criminals are a group of soldiers who re-united ten years after the surrender of Japan during World War Two. They seek a treasure buried under a butcher's shop in a poor neighborhood that been slated for demolition. However, things are complicated when they are forced by their landlord to hire a local boy as an assistant. And then there's the problem that each of the criminals are actively trying to cheat and/or kill each other. Endless Desire is a curious addition to the career of one of Japan's most daring and controversial directors. Imamura gained prominence during the Japanese New Wave where he and other directors like Nagisa Oshima challenged the world with daring, abstract, and polemic indictments of Japanese culture and cinema. Seeing him direct such a film as Endless Desire is a serendipitous shock for the average film scholar. I highly recommend it!
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