The Insect Woman Is A Brutal But Essential Watch

The Insect Woman spends no time making sure its title is accurate as it opens on footage of an insect struggling to crawl up a small hill. This creature is clearly putting all of its strength into this task, yet, it's no use, it just can't make any progress. After the title flashes on-screen, we cut to our actual story concerning Tome Matsuki (Sachiko Hidari), a woman growing up in poverty and without a blood-related father to call her own. Much like the bug seen in the opening scene of the movie, Tome puts all her effort into trying to move up in life (in her case, "moving up" means bettering her social and economic status) but it just ends in despair. Over the course of the forty-five years chronicled in The Insect Woman, Tome is trapped in vicious cycles that refuse to allow her to advance. She's as trapped as that little bug was.


If you're looking for a film to watch that proves to be an amiable easygoing viewing, The Insect Woman is the last film you should turn to. Though being difficult to watch is to be expected given that The Insect Woman belongs to an era of Japanese cinema (the Japanese New Wave) known for its boundary-pushing tendencies, this Shohei Imamura directorial effort still shocks in just how harrowing it is in depicting the hardships Tome experiences even from her earliest years. On-screen depictions of behavior between Tome and her step-father that evoke incestuous overtones are just the start of the misery The Insect Woman plans to throw at its protagonist in order to capture the pain of the working-class.

Such pain tends to arise (though far from exclusively) from characters hailing from poorer backgrounds struggling to work together towards common goals that can benefit the community as a whole. Self-interests tend to be a critical part of the downfall of potential plans to improve the societal status quo for Tome and her associates. A scene depicted Tome and a lover fervently trying to start up a union at their job only for the lover to bail on this mission once he gets a high-paying job at the company is a perfect example of this. There's a palpable sense of tragedy in how The Insect Woman depicts potential sources of hope being dashed away sometimes by these instances of selfishness, other times by the very fabric of society itself that dehumanizes the financially impoverished.

It's an endless cycle of turmoil captured in an unflinching manner by Imamura's camera, which tends to carry a number of visual flourishes to help make Tome's personal struggles as devastating to watch as possible. For one thing, there are a number of instances where critical moments are punctuated with freeze-frames accompanied by Tome reading aloud her poetry in voice-over. These uses of freeze-frame allow the viewer the chance to soak in certain pivotal on-screen events like the death of a child or Tome beating up a woman who betrayed her while accompanying voice-over lets Tome have a rare chance to express her own voice, an element of her personality that society keeps trying to erase completely.

The other critical visual element is how often the camera obscures our vision of Tome and the other characters. Objects like wheat or crowds of other people keep getting into the foreground of the image and obscure our vision of the primary characters. This visual motif, particularly the instances of Tome and other characters being intentionally swallowed up by a surrounding crowd, reminded me of Roma in the best possible way. Both films are about people whose very identities are dwarfed by the overwhelming world around them, the camera can lose track of these individual protagonists just as easily as their individual societies forget that they even exist.

Tome is a fascinatingly complex character in terms of her morality, she does her fair share of scummy things during the course of The Insect Woman, but watching these shots where Imamura carefully has her hidden away in an expansive crowd shot, you can't help but push all those darker moments aside and feel full-on sympathy for her. Just through these images, Tome's plight to reaffirm her humanity is captured in a vivid manner and lead performer Sachiko Hidari does similarly exceptional work realizing this relentless struggle as well. Hidari's portrayal of Tome's various ways of trying to move forward in the world, like the bug in the opening scene of The Insect Woman, tragically depict so much effort being used to so little progress.