A randomly comprehensive survey of extraordinary movie experiences from the art house to the grindhouse, featuring the good, the bad, the ugly, but not the boring or the banal.
Death by hanging in Japan means death by strangulation, or else Nagisa Oshima's admittedly magical-realist satire wouldn't even get started. Death By Hanging would be a very different movie if everyone in the audience assumed that the condemned man's neck should have been broken. Instead, the trouble starts when the man's heart keeps beating beyond all expectation. The officials aren't sure if "R" (Do-yun Yu) should be hung a second time, given their assumption that they're actually dealing with some sort of revenant. R, a rapist and murderer, recognizes some of the officials when he wakes up but claims to have no recollection of his crimes. His Christian chaplain speculates that R's soul has left his body, which means this soul-less but sentient husk should not be hanged again. The other officials, all involved with law enforcement, agree that R has to regain his memories and recognize his guilt before he can be hung a second time. The main action of Oshima's black comedy is the blundering effort to reawaken R's identity, from his wretched background as a Korean immigrant to his carnal lust for his victim. This mock-epic attempt at recovering memories takes the cast from the newspapered walls of an imagined Korean hovel to the rooftops of Tokyo as a reenacted seems to turn all too real.
The director's not-so-subtle message is (in part) that R's original identity was shaped in the first place by the same sort of national prejudices that make the officials look like bigoted idiots, not to mention the very circumstance of being a Korean in Japan. From the way they act when restaging R's family life, Koreans are the n-words of Japan, viewed through a prism of minstrelsy as a rabble of slobbovian morons who piss on each other during family arguments. Having the Japanese act out their stereotypes of Koreans may be the best way to subvert those stereotypes, and it's definitely one of the funniest parts of an often-hilarious movie. As a black comedy it's like Dr. Strangelove in microcosm, with the stakes reduced to one life but with the cartoonish cast behaving just as ludicrously, or even more so in proportion to the situation.
Sacrilege: a drunken Christian priest loses his inhibitions and lunges for a singing partygoer's strap-on.
Death By Hanging is a kind of companion piece to Oshima's previous film, the one with the unfortunate English title Sing a Song of Sex. Despite the bawdy title, that film is an ominous, brilliant portrait of Japan on a precipice of revolt and reaction in the form of rape. In turn, despite its ominous English title, Death By Hanging revels in its absurdity and even throws in a Japanese bawdy song of the sort that superficially formed part of Sing a Song's subject matter. In both movies Oshima seems to be indicting a bawdy streak in Japanese culture that seems inherently reactionary and oppressive (not to mention complacent) insofar as it helps shape R's carnal lust and makes women eligible for the sort of rape the officials so casually or sometimes enthusiastically reenact.
Death also renews an interest in Christianity that Oshima had expressed in his 1962 historical epic The Christian Revolt.It's apropos given the popularity of Christianity among Koreans, which makes it almost natural for Oshima to imagine R, who is based on a real-life convict who wrote a famous book of prison letters before his execution, as a Christ figure who has to die a second time, or as often as possible, for the imagined sins of Koreans as a race. Jesus's saying that he who imagines himself committing sin is just as guilty as if he had committed the actual act is pointedly invoked, with an Oshima twist that indicts those who imagine others committing sins like rape, as if R was fulfilling a Japanese expectation of carnal violence from Koreans. Any supposed Korean proclivity for rape or other crimes thus becomes a projection of Japanese culture's own yen for such atrocities. In effect, Oshima suggests, condemned Koreans, if not all condemned men, die a second death as the nation reassures itself that the dead deserved what they got, while their victims did not. That seems to be the point of the apparition (Akiko Koyama) who calls herself R's sister and tempts him to see his crime as a revolt against Japanese oppression. That the Japanese on some level buy into that interpretation seems apparent from the way the officials one by one start to see the sister when most of them hadn't at first. Eventually, there's an even more urgent need to "liquidate" this accusing ghost than there is to reawaken R's guilt. R's turn finally comes after the chief prosecutor, the one official who's retained some dignity throughout, dares him to leave the prison if he thinks himself innocent. R can't do it because he realizes he can't be innocent in Japan, even as he claims that he isn't guilty in the way the Japanese portray his guilt. In the end he accepts the noose again and the trapdoor opens beneath him, to reveal an empty noose below like the empty sepulcher of Christian myth. Perhaps this second death has exorcised whatever of R had haunted his executioners, but you can easily imagine an eternal recurrence of these scenes despite R's hope to die for the sake of all the other Rs. Death By Hanging can be heavyhanded at times but Oshima mostly succeeds at his Brechtian work of thought-provoking absurdity. The more I see of his films from the Sixties, the more it seems like one of the great bodies of work in the wild world of cinema.
Retired by illness since the 1999 film Gohatto, Nagisa Oshima will be remembered following his death from pneumonia as one of Japan's greatest and most controversial film directors. A key figure of Japan's own "New Wave" of Sixties cinema, Oshima gained global notoriety for his 1976 sex film In the Realm of the Senses, but probably received his widest exposure with American audiences with his 1983 David Bowie POW drama Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. Follow this link to read my reviews of some less familiar Oshima pictures, with The Christian Revolt and Sing a Song of Sex standing out as favorites worthy of greater attention.
Outsiders often think of Japan as a homogeneous nation and culture, but the Japanese themselves are often quite conscious of the problems minorities face in their country. Throughout his career, the director Nagisa Oshima has shown a special concern for the mistreatment of minorities, particularly Koreans. In Amakusa Tokisada Shiro, Oshima took up the topic of the persecution of Christians under the Tokugawa Shogunate. The best known Japanese work on this subject outside Japan is probably the Catholic author Shusaku Endo's novel Silence, an adaptation of which has long been a dream project for Martin Scorsese. While Endo generously focuses on the persecution of European missionaries, Oshima looks at the suffering of Japanese Christians and their conflicted response to persecution. He also strives for a critical synthesis of Japanese and European models of artistic representation while questioning in an almost postmodern way exactly what in people's hearts can be represented pictorially at all.
Oshima's protagonist is a historical figure, Shiro Amakusa, but seems to have taken liberties with history by making a character who supposedly died while still in his teens a former samurai (Hashizo Okawa) who's regarded as a leader of his peasant community as well as a charismatic prophet. His people are being pushed to the breaking point by a rapacious nobility that blames inadequate tax revenue on Shiro's religion. The local samurai, with one noble exception, compete to devise ways to torture Christians and terrorize them into recanting their faith. One such turncoat, Emosaku (Rentaro Mikuni) has become a court painter, specializing in European-style oil painting which he claims represents a subject's actual personality better than traditional Japanese art. He balks, however, when commanded to paint Christians performing the "straw dance," -- they are wrapped in husks of straw, set on fire and set running -- and is suspected of remaining a Christian. Desperate to save himself, he rats out Christians inside the local lord's household. This undermines Shiro's long-term plan to stage an uprising within the castle to overthrow the oppressive lord, though the plan often seems like little more than a promise of redemption to his angry co-religionists.
Shiro is a conflicted hero with an uncertain understanding of his own religion, despite his mother's constant tutelage. He sends mixed messages to his people, assuring them that their persecution is not the will of God but that an enraged peasant going on a foolhardy mission of revenge was God's will. As the pressure builds for an uprising, he rationalizes it by saying that his people will fight as oppressed peasants, not as Christians in violation of the turn-the-other-cheek rule. Once the fighting is underway, it threatens to get out of his control when a charismatic ronin offers his assistance and more ronin join him. Still straddling the fence, Shiro defers to the ronin on military matters until several setbacks -- including the hostility of European military advisers to the shogun and an alleged excommunication from the Catholic Church -- forces a decisive three-way choice on the Christians. Shall they continue to fight the samurai head-on, as the ronin wants, disperse into smaller inconspicuous groups, as some others want, or fortify themselves in one place to resist a samurai assault, as Shiro wants. When Shiro is finally driven to assert himself violently in a showdown with the ronin, who has called him out as a coward, the feeling is unmistakable that there's nothing left for him to do but die -- and take thousands with him....
Oshima maintains a critical but not negative attitude toward Christianity, but constantly reminds us of the samurai cruelty that drove so many to become Christians as well as revolt against the social order. While many of the "history of cruelty" movies made in Europe focus on the atrocities perpetrated by Christians on others -- witches, heretics, etc. -- in Oshima's film the shoe is on the other foot. The effect is largely the same, however, since for the Japanese filmmaker Christians are the other made objects of empathy. His film really transcends my theoretical genre, rising from a litany of torture to the level of epic tragedy, filmed in appropriate long-take tableaux with theatrical intensity and chiaroscuro cinematography. Scenes often develop in slow-burn fashion, but the payoff, especially in the final confrontation between Shiro and the ronin, is tremendous.
Transcending his historical subject, Oshima also invites his audience to question whether his eloquently exquisite or brutal images can truly capture the spirit of the time or the personality of the players. This proposition is put forth explicitly in Emosaku's explication of the relative virtues of Japanese and European art. He tells his patron that Japanese painting is best for landscapes and "beautiful figures," while the European style is best for portraiture that evokes a subject's true self. Over the course of the film, it becomes clear that Oshima himself is testing these premises, switching frequently from huge close-ups designed to catch profound emotion to vast landscape long shots that reduce armies to ants against the mountains.
Cinema itself is a third thing entirely, and in one sequence of visually "rhyming" shots Oshima implicitly asks whether cinema can catch emotional truth any better than painting.
Between the subject and its representation stands the subjectivity of the artist, and that's what Emosaku really seems to stand for. Does his portrait show the truth of the lord -- the lord himself asks, "Are you trying to say I look repulsive?" -- or only Emosaku's opinion of the man. The question rises again when, after repeatedly refusing to paint a straw dance, Emosaku appears to have a real religious experience during the crucifixion of Shiro's mother and sister, along with Shiro's one samurai ally and his wife on either side of a single cross.
Oshima has illustrated Shiro's reaction, and that of the other Christians, by bathing them in floodlights and leading the camera through a lengthy tracking shot of dozens of despairing or prayerful close-ups.
The painter responds to the scene with a picture of Christ crucified amid a field of crosses as doves rise heavenward and the Virgin watches in the sky. Depending on the witness, his may have been as "true" a report of the event as Oshima's cinematography -- Shintaro Kawasaki did the brilliant actual work. In the same way, perhaps, Christianity is one thing to Shiro, another to his mother, and something else yet to someone else. All of this is a possibly pretentious way of saying that there's a lot going on in Amakusa Tokisada Shiro to make it interesting if not compelling for people without any special sympathy for Christianity. It seems to be a relatively unknown item for Americans in Oshima's filmography -- ignored even by the otherwise Oshima-rich Criterion Collection -- but its neglect is unjustified. The Christian Revolt is a dark epic that deserves wider renown.
No English subtitles on this trailer -- uploaded to YouTube by WorldCinemateque -- but it'll give you some idea of the moving images and the terrific score by Riichiro Manabe.
Do you remember that famous scene in Casablanca when the Germans start singing their song, and then the French start singing their song, and they try to outsing each other but the crowd drowns out the Nazis? Now imagine a film with the same sort of conflict running through nearly its entire length, except that you have no clue whatsoever who the good guys and bad guys are, though you have a strong feeling that something terrible will happen soon. That's not what pops into your mind when you see the English title of this film from Criterion Eclipse's Oshima's Outlaw Sixties collection. You'd be excused for expecting something funnier or at least bawdier. Oshima's actual title, which translates into "A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs," is in the mock-academic mode I've seen in other Japanese films (e.g. Shohei Imamura's "Entomology of Japan," known in America as The Insect Woman). The Japanese title still doesn't advertise the ominous quality of Oshima's vibrantly bleak portrait of student life in flux. If I'd been distributing this film in the U.S., I'd take my title from a non-sex song sung in the film: The Festival of the Black Sun. Does that sound too much like a horror film? Perhaps, but if it inspires a slight sense of dread as you sit down for the show, then there'd be truth in advertising.
It's late winter, 1967: time for college entrance exams amid the light snow and campus protests against the Vietnam War. Oshima follows four young men who seem less concerned about how they did on the test than with finding out the identity of the girl who sat in seat number 469, who signs an anti-war petition "Fujiwara XXX." She's not unworthy of young men's obsession, but their pursuit is sidetracked while they attend a class party at a tavern thrown by Professor Otake, a literature teacher and expert on the titular bawdy drinking songs. He teaches his co-ed cohort one that we'll hear through the rest of the picture. It opens:
Let's begin with the first case, hoi! Doing it with an only daughter, hoi! Ask her parents' permission first, hoi!
Future director Juzo Itami plays Professor Otake at his last banquet.
During various reprises, singers will take us as far as the twelfth case, but Otake moves on to a ranting reading from a favorite author in favor of rebellion before he passes out drunk. He and the four lads end up overnighting in the girls' dorm. One of the guys ventures out of their guest room and blunders about the halls, encountering Otake, freshly passed out, in his own room with a gas heater in disarray. In the morning, the kids learn that Otake has died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Reeling from the news, the boys, with their ringleader Nakamura feeling certain that he killed Otake somehow, rekindle their obsession with No. 469, and imagine themselves gang-raping her in the exam room. While Nakamura crashes Otake's wake and confronts his mistress, Miss Tanigawa, the other three guys hook up with a Korean girl and head to a protest concert in search of 469. At the wake, Otake is lauded as an activist who had led protests against the reinstatement of the traditional "imperialist" Founder's Day holiday. Friends sing protest songs at the wake to honor his memory, but Nakamura disrupts the remembrance by reprising "Let's start with the first case." It's a protest of his own, his insistence that death has no meaning of the kind Otake's friends want to impose on it. It's also an assertion that the bawdy song expressed Otake's essence more than the political lyrics.
Akiko Koyama, last seen in Oshima's Violence at Noon, as Tanigawa
The boys adopt the song as a mantra, as if they can make it the one constant in their uncertain existence. Other characters have songs as well; the Korean girl, for instance, has a number about the hard life of a prostitute. The importance of music to the story and the cultural moment in which it's set becomes most clear when she and the other three boys reach the protest rally. On this ostensibly anti-American occasion, we find Japanese students playing western instruments and singing American folk songs in English: This Land is Your Land, We Shall Overcome, and from a single riveting voice, Goodnight Irene.
Kaneda, the Korean, reprises her song and is asked by the clueless folkies whether it comes from America or Africa. We hear a kind of cultural synthesis in the making as the students perform a Japanese-language, American-style folk song. Finally, No. 469 takes the stage and sings the ominous song about the Festival of the Black Sun. Nakamura's pals try to drown her out with "Let's start with the first case," then with confessions of their imaginary rape of her.
"The Festival of the Black Sun is upon us: Japan, Spring 1967." Talent search winner Kazuko Tajima as Mayuko Fujiwara, "No. 469."
Amazingly, Miss Fujiwara dares them to make the rape real, setting up a climax in the exam hall that includes an oration by Miss Tanigawa on the Korean origin of Japan's divine dynasty, one more counter-reprise of the first-case song, the stretching out of a stripped Fujiwara as if upon an altar, with just enough hints of Dies Irae from composer Hikaru Hayashi to sell the sacrifice metaphor, and an admonition that what's happening is real that simultaneously dares us to question the premise.
Nihon Shunka-ko, to let the title speak for itself, is a coming-of-age film for a nation in tumult. The students are waiting to learn their future while worrying about the future of their country and the wider world. The songs in the picture express competing if not incompatible worldviews, and the cumulative effect is a carefully calibrated cacophony giving voice(s) to the uncertainty of "1967: Spring in Japan." The real-life protests included in the film give it an authentic sense of urgency, while the long takes with which Oshima shows us the musical protest rally sympathetically convey the students' own sense of its significance while sustaining suspense as we await the inevitable confrontations. Oshima immerses us in the atmosphere of the moment, from the weather to the music to the light of the bonfires. The "you are there" quality of this film is particularly strong, and cinematographer Akira Takada deserves much of the credit for that.Oshima completists may want to make something, given one of his best-known later films, of the repeated references to "Lawrence," with the students wondering whether D. H. or T. E. is meant, but since I haven't yet seen Merry Christmas Mr. LawrenceI'll say no more on the subject.
Scenic views by Akira Takada
Instead, I'll strongly recommend Sing a Song of Sex, since we have to call it that, as a fascinating film that takes a critical yet sympathetic look at the Sixties generation without succumbing to the Pop Art temptations of the era. Oshima has shown enough versatility in the Eclipse box set to make me certain that he could make a Pop Art film if he wanted to. Fortunately, with no offense intended against Pop Art, the director made a film that has dated less and is probably more accessible now than many contemporary exercises in style for its own sake. Almost without intending it, also, Oshima has made a true musical film in which songs express character and advance the plot without the songs being "numbers" that people burst into implausibly. Nihon Shunka-ko is a one-of-a-kind film and an extraordinary achievement.
Criterion Eclipse doesn't give you trailers, but Criterion has uploaded one for this film on its YouTube page. It doesn't do the film justice, either, but take a look anyway.
Throughout the 1960s, Nagisa Oshima shifted from color to black-and-white as the requirements of his material dictated. In the five-film Oshima's Outlaw Sixties collection from Criterion Eclipse, 1965's luridly colorful Pleasures of the Flesh is followed by this monochromatically sordid, somewhat noirish, somewhat satirical story of a serial rapist. Film historians find it noteworthy for the intensity of its montage. This 99-minute movie has something like 2,000 separate shots, which made it look more radical in its own time, probably, than it does in retrospect. In some parts the pacing seems pretty much normal by 21st century standards -- think of a more intellectual Michael Bay. In others, the rapid editing has the same fracturing, disorienting effect that I presume Oshima intended.
Violence at Noon opens with the latest crime of the so-called "High Noon Attacker." His victim, the housemaid Shino, recognizes him at first as Eisuke, a man she knew (quite intimately, we'll learn) from her village past. Eventually it dawns on her that her old acquaintance is Japan's most wanted criminal, but by then he's ready to overpower her, bind her and rape her. He then goes on to kill her employer before fleeing.
Strangely, Shino plays a double game with police investigators. While appearing to cooperate with them, she doesn't divulge her knowledge of the HNA's true identity. Instead, she starts firing off letters to Eisuke's wife Matsuko, a schoolteacher, tipping her off about hubby's criminal career. Matsuko also keeps mum, and as the women correspond, the police investigate, and Eisuke keeps on raping, we learn the history that holds the triangle together.
Kei Sato as Eisuke, the "High Noon Attacker"
Oshima's film, based on a novel itself inspired by true crimes, becomes a peculiar portrait of the pathologies of communal living. Our three protagonists once lived in a model village run on communal principles. Both women were involved with Genji, an ambivalent politician who runs for office while dreaming of romantic suicide. Genji asks Matsuko to marry her and threatens to kill himself with his homemade noose if she won't. She laughs at him. He then invites Shino to die with him. Her family had threatened collective suicide during earlier hard times, but Genji had bailed them out. Though she has chores to do, Shino decides to go along and hang herself with a kind of "why not?" attitude. But while Genji hangs himself properly, Shino's branch breaks.
Above, Akiko Koyama as Matsuko; below, Saeda Kawaguchi as Shino. The rope remains the same.
Eisuke, a local malcontent, has been tailing the pair at Matsuko's request. He presumes Shino dead as she hits the ground and closes in to verify his suspicion. Satisfied with his diagnosis, he indulges in a bit of highly sweaty supposed necrophilia. It's only after he ports her body to a riverbank (to dump it in?) that Shino revives. She nearly drowns the man in her fury when she realizes what he did to her. While village leaders cover up Genji's suicide (he'd won his election by a landslide), Shino leaves for the big city, leaving Matsuko and Eisuke to form their own perversely indifferent alliance before he in turn embarks on his rape tour of Japan.
Oshima seems to be saying something about the dangerous intimacy that arises in self-consciously voluntary experimental communities like the one that produced Eisuke and friends. But any philosophical or simply satirical point he meant to make is arguably undercut by his conception of Shino as a kind of passive, almost brainless femme fatale. Shino is one of the weirdest teases I've seen in cinema, because what she teases is death. She promises death but doesn't deliver, usually through no fault of her own. By the end of the film, you might be excused for thinking that she can't die -- though I should quickly add that there's no supernatural implications whatsoever involved. But she seems to sap other people's will to live, or tip their moral balance, as if she were a succubus or a vamp in the Theda Bara mode. Her family doesn't follow through on their suicide threat. She fails to hang herself at Genji's side. Her unwitting simulation of death apparently inspires Eisuke's compulsion to rape. Finally she draws Matsuko into her morbid orbit as the movie builds to a climax not of suspense, but of pathological inevitability.
Is Shino a product of her social environment or does her strangeness help doom that social experiment? I don't have the analytical equipment to judge, and I'm not sure if Oshima himself intended to give us a definite answer. Violence at Noon lacks the simple ironies of Pleasures of the Flesh, and the extent to which Violence gives you more food for thought may determine whether it's the superior film of the two. Stylistically, Violence is certainly more of a jolt. Oshima employs camera movements and camera angles as well as a multitude of cuts to focus our attention on every potentially significant character detail, lingering most often on Eisuke's face as his eyes blink and roll, his lips go limp or sneer, and the sweat runs freely. The most disquieting camera movements are among the most simple. On a train, as Shino and Matsuko contemplate a suicide pact, the camera simply drifts queasily. Then Oshima cuts and starts the camera drifting again. Whatever you think of the story, Oshima's pictorial ambition is undeniable. As social commentary, psychoanalysis, or emotional freakshow, Violence at Noon is very much a mixed bag. As cinema, it might be more than the sum of its parts. That's for movie buffs to determine on their own.
The trailer was uploaded to YouTube by WorldCinemateque:
Nagisa Oshima's film is an adaptation of a novel called Pleasures In the Coffin, which probably gets closer to the truth of the story. In the film, the protagonist Atsushi identifies his "coffin" as a suitcase filled with 30,000,000 yen. It's been entrusted to him by a bureaucrat from the Agriculture Ministry, who embezzled it. He expects to be caught and expects to do time. Like the heroine of Hugo Haas's One Girl's Confession, he figures that any money he's kept after he does his time is his to keep. He leaves his loot with Atsushi, whom he trusts because he has something on him. He saw Atsushi kill a man on a train.
Atsushi works in an ad agency and as a private tutor. His favorite student, the object of his romantic fantasies, is Shoko. As a girl, she was molested. The man Atsushi killed was the molester. Shoko's parents put him up to it as a matter of the girl's honor. Atsushi dreams of marrying Shoko, but she marries a corporate executive instead. Frustrated, and with one year left on the embezzler's jail term, Atsushi boldly decides to spend the 30 million in order to stick it to everybody. Once the suitcase is empty, it'll become his metaphorical coffin; he plans to kill himself when the money's gone, before the embezzler can do worse to him.
Atsushi is as free as a man could possibly be -- isn't he?
Oshima has set us up for a fantasy of freedom and sensuality, and the case copy for this first film in Criterion Eclipse's Oshima's Outlaw Sixties collection only encourages the expectation. What we actually get is a grimly feverish satire that destroys and rebuilds the fantasy several times over. The most hopeless fantasy, it turns out, is the idea of cutting loose from all ties to the past and sharing that freedom with others. Atsushi seeks out loose women to spite Shoko, but none of them are as loose or free as he hopes. Hitomi uses his money to bribe a yakuza boyfriend who still demands sex and threatens her with a bottle of acid. Shizuko hands his money over to her husband and children and later hints at blackmail after Atsushi has told her too much about his past. After beating up her husband and paying his hospital bill, Atsushi instantly tries to hook up with Keiko, a virginal young doctor first seen slapping an older male colleague who was groping her. Keiko has issues and anxieties of her own that make her a hopeless partner for our hero. He finally falls for Mari, a prostitute described as "mute and a little crazy," but she also has a gangster boyfriend who beats up Atsushi until he realizes how much the man will pay for Mari. This goon is ultimately impressed by Atsushi's cool manner and easy way with money, and thinks that Atsushi may be just the guy to help him nab a 30,000,000 yen stash that he heard about in prison....
Scenes from the Hitomi episode, with Mariko Naga as Hitomi
On top of all this, Atsushi can't let go of his yearning for Shoko. We first see him fantasizing about her playing runaway bride with him, only to see the fantasy dissolve before our eyes. He hallucinates Shoko throughout the picture; sometimes she's a ghostlike figure lurking near the action, and sometimes he mistakes his other paramours for her. The embezzler also haunts him increasingly as his release date nears. Atsushi's resolution to die doesn't leave him unafraid of the old guy's vengeance, and that's his trouble in a nutshell. Sure, he does get to experience some pleasures of the flesh (but not so many as you'd think) but for someone with money to burn and nothing, presumably, to lose, he hardly ever seems to have a good time. The moral of the story may be that he's ultimately incapable of doing so -- psychologically or emotionally, at least. Whether he survives or not, the film leaves you wondering whether he's ever known how to live.
Katsuo Nakamura and Toshiko Higuchi before and after their ordeal in the surf.
Etsuraku, as Oshima calls it, get the Outlaw Sixties collection to a strong start. The direction the story takes took me by surprise and made the film more than the genre exercise it's advertised to be. Katsuo Nakamura's brooding performance as Atsushi really sells the concept, and he's supported by an impressive and attractive group of actresses. The film's low budget sometimes sticks out, but Oshima, cinematographer Akira Takada and art director Taro Imayasu do some fine work with sets and locations, from a white-on-white hotel suite to a turbulent beach where Nakamura and Toshiku Higuchi as Keiko take a grueling walk through the waves. The film goes by in a brisk, jump cut-assisted 91 minutes that makes poor Atsushi's year go by all too quickly but feels just right to this viewer. It makes me feel like I made the right move getting Outlaw Sixties, which means four more Oshima films to review in the coming weeks. Of course, the fact that you couldn't help but get it at a discount from Barnes & Noble this month didn't hurt, either, but for those still wondering or wavering about this set, Pleasures of the Flesh is a strong sign that it'll prove a good investment for wild-world-of-cinema tourists.