Life viewed from the lower rungs

The Japanese director Shohei Imamura once said that he was devoted to finding out “what differentiates humans from other animals.” But the three films in the Criterion Collection’s boxed set “Pigs, Pimps & Prostitutes” are less concerned with pinpointing the distinctions between humans and animals than asserting their similarities.

Violently rebutting the view of human and particularly Japanese life as fundamentally orderly and decorous, Imamura’s movies are wild, unruly things, populated by creatures with the base lusts and brute tenacity of untamed beasts.

Released in 1961, “Pigs and Battleships” was Imamura’s fifth feature, but he considered it the first expression of his mature style. From the title forward, the film engages the gulf between instinct and order embodied in its first shot: a pan from an American flag, fluttering atop a military base in an occupied Japanese seaside town, to the streets of its red-light district, crawling with sailors and prostitutes, accompanied by a woozy rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

The film’s depiction of the occupying Americans as venal and sometimes violent is unmerciful, but it pales beside Imamura’s characterization of his countrymen as scuttling small-time hoods and compliant prostitutes, literally fighting over the scraps from their occupiers’ tables. The American’s waste, along with the corpse of an unlucky competitor, go to feed the pigs that are both the gangsters’ primary business and a reflection of their swinish nature.

At the film’s climax, which plays like an insane version of a musical finale, the pigs run rampant through the city’s streets as guns blaze and humans are consumed by their own appetites.

“The Insect Woman” likens its heroine to a beetle trudging methodically up an earthen mound. Tome, played by the steadfastly unheroic Sachiko Hidari, is a primeval version of the cutthroat dames of pre-code Hollywood, overcoming seemingly insurmountable adversity with pure, plodding persistence.

Born to a slow-witted peasant father to whom she is both lover and surrogate parent, she drifts into a succession of menial jobs, from factory worker to prostitute, crawling her way up the ladder but always being cast down again. She is raped and abused, betrays and is betrayed, but she plugs forward, her actions dictated more by reflex than determination.

“The Insect Woman” proceeds with an almost clinical remove, its abrupt freeze-frames pinning Tome to the screen like a specimen under glass. With “Intentions of Murder,” Imamura trades “Pigs and Battleships’ ” widescreen compositions and “Insect Woman’s” structuralist barriers for a style that fulfills his self-proclaimed penchant for “messy films.” He pushes his protagonists to the side and rear of the frame, almost losing them amid the constant chaos of the surrounding world.

Sadako (Masumi Harukawa), the downtrodden housewife at the movie’s core, is likened visually to a rat on a wheel, but beneath the surface of her confinement lie impulses surging with the force of the trains that rumble by her house regularly. Not for nothing does Imamura show us her husband, a faithless, tightly wound librarian (Ko Nishimura) filing away a copy of Hebert Marcuse’s “Eros and Civilization.”

When Sadako is raped by a burglar (Shigeru Tsuyuguchi), her first reaction is to kill herself, but instead she develops a strange and ill-fated attraction toward him, her feelings of shame and self-destruction eventually turning outward. Only in Imamura’s realm could a shift from suicidal to homicidal impulses be seen as a positive development.

There’s a level of remove in Imamura’s movies that separates him from his contemporary Seijun Suzuki, although the films’ frenetic, sometimes jumbled, progression mitigates against any sense of sociological study. He obviously admires his heroines’ implacable instinct for self-preservation, but he does so from a distance. Perhaps he’s just indulging another, equally primal impulse: the need to watch.

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