Dr. Akagi

In his pristine linen suit and natty straw boater, the village physician at the heart of Shohei Imamura's Dr. Akagi cuts an eccentric figure. He never stops moving, racing from appointment to appointment, as he's called to handle marital problems and wayward daughters as well as medical needs. "Being a family doctor is all legs," reads a sign in his clinic.

Imamura describes the film, his 25th in a career that includes two top Cannes Film Festival prizes, as a tribute to his own doctor father, but an idiosyncratic tribute it is. Set in the waning days of World War II, when Japan wouldn't face facts and surrender, Dr. Akagi chronicles the battles on the ground to keep the civilian population healthy. Although others brand him a quack, the doctor insists that hepatitis is ravaging the nation, and he sets out to make his case without the help of the medical establishment. He's joined in the effort by a band of outsiders with little in common except devotion to the doctor. There's Sonoko, a young prostitute whom Dr. Akagi takes under his wing as a promise to her dying father; there's Toriumi, the morphine-addled surgeon, and Umemoto, a bizarre and horny religious leader. A Dutch POW secretly nursed back to health in the clinic offers guidance as the doctor cobbles together a working microscope to understand the disease better.

All this may sound like the stuff of medical thrillers, but Imamura (Pigs and Battleships, The Eel) is too perverse a filmmaker merely to champion an underdog. Militaristic Japan is under the microscope here. Thuggish army officers call the shots, and under their noses sex and gossip fuel the seaside community. Portrayed by Akira Emoto, Dr. Akagi is a remote and formal presence, not the genial man of the people a genre film would provide. The shrill Sonoko inappropriately announces her love for the doctor during an air-raid drill. Medical procedures, like the removal of a liver from a fresh corpse, are garishly filmed and set to the incongruous beat of "American"-style jazz.

Compared with The Eel, Imamura's last film, Dr. Akagi feels strained and unresolved. The film denies us the uplift of seeing a problem solved or a man redeemed. That's fine -- it's Imamura's choice not to repeat himself or other directors. But he offers an odd brew instead: black comedy, political critique, and, in rare sequences like the doctor's reaction to the news of his son's death, cinematic poetry. It's an audacious prescription, but it doesn't go down very easily. At the Museum of Fine Arts this weekend and next.

-- Scott Heller