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“I’m better than white-collar men,” Subuyan Ogata (Shōichi Ozawa), the protagonist of Shōhei Imamura’s likably shaggy The Pornographers (1966), declares late in the movie. “My work may be immoral, but I treat everyone honestly, dammit!” Ogata works in pornography — he’s a modest producer and distributor that might stage a shoot in some secluded brush when outdoors or in a small flat near the place where he lives — as well as in half-hearted pimping, which usually sees him wrangling performatively “virginal” “schoolgirls” for crusty old men. 

If you tracked down everyone he works with and everyone else in his life and asked them whether they think he treats them with the benevolent honesty he thinks he does, the answers might not be as unanimously in his favor as he’d probably like. Just ask Keiko (Keiko Sagawa), a teenage girl for whom he isn’t subtle about longing and who doesn’t like his longing much at all. Everyone would agree, though, that his dedication to his line of work is unquestionable. Much of the movie’s dialogue fascinatingly jumps on his philosophies, plus the philosophies of his coworkers, about sex in a way that underscores that this isn’t all just one-track-mindedly about a quick buck. 

Based on Erogotoshitachi, a novel by Akiyuki Nosaka, The Pornographers derives some very dark comedy from the set pieces that arise from the blue-movie shoots that keep Ogata’s business alive. There’s one involving a schoolgirl-fantasy film where one might be inclined to laugh about how bad the main actress is at taking directions, then might want to die of mortification when it later becomes clear that the actor opposite her is her father. Though the movie, bequeathed an anything-is-possible atmosphere with its post-WWII setting, is more seriously about the problems peripheral to Ogata’s hustling: the gangsters and government figures and thieves who hassle him; the complicated relationship he has with the barbershop owner, Haru (Sumiko Sakamoto), he lives with alongside her daughter, Keiko, and a carp too fat for his tank Haru is certain is her husband reincarnated.

Imamura at no point adheres to a three-act structure or anything like conventional storytelling. The Pornographers has scenes that unfold like we’ve dropped in on the life of someone who doesn’t know they’re being surveilled. It comfortably recreates the unforeseeable turns of a life, given a dose of absurdity by Ogata’s chaotic existence and the comedic pitches of many of the characterizations. A feeling of aimlessness makes the more-than-two-hour The Pornographers vulnerable sometimes to tedium, but it gets a lift from the roundly spirited performances and Imamura’s regularly cheeky style.