The Eel · reception & legacy
1997 · Shōhei Imamura
How The Eel has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
Its shared Palme d'Or at Cannes 1997 (with Kiarostami's Taste of Cherry) struck some critics at the time as a surprisingly modest choice for the top prize; today it's warmly regarded as gentle late-career Imamura, though it remains oddly under-seen for a Palme winner.
What's debated
The perennial cinephile debate: is this 'minor Imamura' that lucked into the Palme while Vengeance Is Mine and The Insect Woman went unrewarded, or is its mellow humanism the point?
Its footprint
The indelible image is Kōji Yakusho quietly confiding in his pet eel — a man who talks to a fish more easily than to people — which has become shorthand for the film whenever it comes up.
Where it stands
A canon-adjacent curiosity: cinephiles know it as 'the other 1997 Palme winner' and as part of Kōji Yakusho's astonishing 1997 (alongside Kurosawa Kiyoshi's Cure), a beloved-but-under-watched entry in the Japanese New Wave master's late run.