Duty, Honor, Crazy: Shohei Imamura

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"DEAR SIS, WE'RE STARVING. Go back to whoring. Please."

So reads the note that prostitute-turned-nurse Sonoko receives from her younger siblings in "Dr. Akagi."

That matter-of-fact mixture of the outrageous and the ordinary are standard operating procedure for Shohei Imamura (1926-2006), whose retrospective wraps up over the next two weeks at the Freer/Sackler and the AFI Silver. The letter additionally conveys the Japanese director's obsessions with family, duty, propriety and shifting moral codes.

Even if you've missed the opening weeks of "A Man Vanishes: The Legacy of Shohei Imamura," it's not too late to catch a quarter of his 20 features.

Set in the waning months of World War II, 1998's "Dr. Akagi" (Fri., 7 p.m., Freer) is a farce played for keeps, as Akira Emoto's small-town physician juggles a frenzied routine with secret hepatitis research while every last subject of the emperor is prepared by a militaristic monoculture for one last, futile battle.

Believing that ultra-conformist Japan had some pretty untidy beginnings, Imamura turned his sights on Kuragejima, an isolated dot in the Ryukyu Islands, for 1968's "The Profound Desire of the Gods" (Sun., 2 p.m., Freer). As the Futori family does penance for multigenerational incest and fishing with explosives, their friends and neighbors welcome corporate exploiters from the mainland. Trapped between the cruel, animistic past and the careless, commercial present, the island's inhabitants are left as children of myth and Coca-Cola, spiritually homeless in the only place they know.

If that film presents Imamura at his most epic, 1997's "The Eel" (starting Dec. 22, AFI), a tale of a murderous cuckold who learns to transfer his affection from a solitary pet fish to a motley crew of social underdogs, represents a more private struggle.

Like "Akagi," "The Eel" culminates in a madcap brawl that splits the difference between slapstick and brutality, even while the picture as a whole — a ragged standoff between horror, satire, comedy and romance — remains touching, funny and bizarre.

» Various sites, dates and prices; click here for the full schedule.

Written by Express contributor Glenn Dixon

Photos courtesy AFI