Violence at Noon

Oshima's Violence at Noon is a meditation on the destructive capacity of love. It traces the course of a grotesque love triangle between a rapist and two women who both love him, leading to an ultimately tragic conclusion.

This is a deliberately deep, art house film, with much ponderous dialogue. The dialogue serves as much to express Oshima's ideas on love as to advance the plot, with lines such as "Love has no rewards." The film also features some great cinematography, with excellent use of black and white. A sequence in which a violent attack is represented by a series of photographs is a particular highlight.

However, the film suffers from a tendency to let ideas take precedence over characterization. We often have little idea why the characters do certain actions, a particular problem given that some of their activities are extreme. Ultimately, this is a thought-provoking film that at times descends into the head scratching.

I really don't know why Oshima's early films have taken so long to become available in the U.S. They are spectacular! I suppose because their thematic content is so specific to the Japan of the post-war "reconstruction" at the hands of the Americans. As radical, contemporary, and at times experimental as Oshima's films from this era were, his landscapes, to my eye, more closely resemble the tradition of Japanese landscape-painting than those of Kurosawa or Mizoguchi. In this film, the past is captured in just such painterly, deep-focus majesty, with dizzying zooms thrown in just to leave you disoriented. The present is soft, blurry, almost indiscernible at times. I'm interpreting the political content of this violent, lude, nasty story to deal with Japan's inability to live up to its WWII atrocities, or from a different perspective, the ease with which it forgave itself. I admit that I don't see how the last scenes fit into that interpretation, but that doesn't make those scenes any less haunting.

This movie has something incredible. The fastness. We are put, since the first scenes, in a crazy mood made of hunger rather than satisfaction. And this hunger is the one of a rapist.

Eisuke, the "demon of noon" is a serial sexual abuser that, as we witness from the first minutes, tries to put his hands of fury over a young girl called Shino, a waiter who lives in Kansai. Far from her native village in Nagano prefecture from which the "demon" belongs too. Before moving, however, Shino used to have sex with Genji the son of the village master in which she used to live. The reason was escaping from poverty after a flood that destroyed almost all the house of the place they both belong to. The hunger of the girl became so the reason she slept with him. However, he really liked her. So this leaded to a double suicide of love. The Japanese call it "shunji" and could have been a traditional element for a classic plot. But Oshima is an innovator. In fact, Genji, liked by a shy village school teacher called Matsuko, is the only one to die. Shino was escaped and raped by Eisuke, the demons that here makes his first crime. So we realize that Shino was raped twice. Matsuko, rather than feel lost, is more and more attracted by Eisuke, and Shino, after the second rape, decides to inform her the real identity of the demon. The problem is that Matsuko and Eisuke are now a married couple. The teacher, is shy as ever, but this happens only on the surface. And, in Japan especially, not every time to appear means to be. We discover she is so much attracted by his violent and beastly drunk husband to avoid to help the girl. However, at one point, she decides to help but, after the death condemn to Eisuke, to end her days in a double suicide with Shino. They did it but Shino another time survives.

Explaining the plot here is necessary to understand the themes of a story completely untidy made of flashbacks and close ups that seem trying to show us the inner soul of the characters. This is given by the fact that this plot evolves under the skins. Under the surface. Even if the violence occurs at noon. Here Matsuko is not a wife as Ozu could have imagined. Here we have a demon that lies under her as well as the characters of Nomura's movies. The forest, however, as the idea of the sun as heat rather than light, is a theme yet developed in Kurosawa's Rashomon where we have, as in this movie, a generally hidden act that lies under the sun and not surrounded by fog.

Another thing very important is the political message behind this work. Even id we are not in a move like "Night and fog of Japan" where this element is stressed more we can consider the two dead victims, Genji and Matsuko, the real couple of "shunji". They, being both pure before the flood, somehow loved each other but were attracted by the flesh and instincts after the order was destroyed. Eisuke is the tool that, creating the chaos, can show us this. As well the easiness that makes Shino living without caring too much about, not only her liar soul, but also her violated body. She concerns only about the goal. That is eating after the starvation. As the postwar Japan did in front of the bombings by the Americans while old officers were killing themselves. The hunger, if reaches a goal, so not as happens with Eisuke, who feels a thirsts of passions, can be justified. And Shino wins as Japan did.

I bought a rare copy of this for $1 at my local library, being a fan of foreign (especially Japanese) cinema, and never having heard of the director, Nagisa Oshima. I definitely cannot say that the film is bad, because like the reviewer above, I did not understand it. It isn't that I had difficulty following what was happening in the storyline, which was pretty straightforward, but I just had no idea what the intent of the filmmakers were, what the purpose of the story was. The storyline is so bizarre and sensationalistic - a serial rapist and his relationship with both his wife and one of his victims, all three of whom used to be part of some kind of commune for intellectuals (I didn't even know it was a commune until reading another reviewer's synopsis) - that I am sure there must be some underlying symbolism or message here the director was trying to convey. Maybe it had something to do with Japanese society of the time (1966), I'm not sure? Therefore, I must give my opinion of the outward details of the film. The black-and-white cinematography of the film was exquisite, and the constant cutting of shots from scene to scene was highly impressive. It is obvious a great deal of energy and resources were put into the production. This film is outwardly exceedingly beautiful, on a par with other such visual Japanese films as "Kwaidan" and "Kagemusha." The music score was arresting, as well. Other reviewers all seem to compare this to the work of French director Alain Resnais, but I have never seen any of his films. To me, the film seemed distantly related to the works of Stanley Kubrick in its meticulous attention to visual compositions (I saw the film in widescreen, and I can't even imagine watching it in full screen) and its delving into very dark, uncharted psychological territory. Another film to compare this to is Nicholas Roeg's "Bad Timing: A Sensual Obsession" - another dark, non-linear, visually beautiful film whose themes were very difficult to penetrate. The other major drawback is the length - this film does seem to go on about a half hour too long.

I would love to have a conversation with the director on just what the storyline means, but unfortunately, I had to watch it without any frame of reference. That made it a frustrating intellectual experience, but an impressive aesthetic one.

Possibly the most confusing movie I've ever sat through, it took me a long time to get anything out of it. I just couldn't grab onto even the slightest shred of a plot, and, without the ability to find a hook, it felt at first like watching a blank wall. But eventually, I started making inroads and, as the film progresses, its chopped-up plot begins to emerge. It is the story of a rapist and murderer and two women with whom he is intricately involved. Shino is one of his rape victims, and also, we find out, a woman he rescued from suicide in the past. Jinbo is the killer's wife, who knows his guilt (or at least suspects it) but loves him and wants to protect him. Nagisa Oshima actually went to film school in France, and, though part of the Japanese New Wave, no one will miss the French New Wave influences, especially Alain Resnais, whose films have similarly infuriated me in the past with their difficult narratives. Even if I never understood what the hell happened here, the film has several great aspects. The acting is quite good, that's clear. But, in particular, the music, by Hikaru Hayashi, and the cinematography, by Akira Takada, are extremely beautiful. I think I might like this one better if I give it yet another try.

ETA: zetes here in the distant year 2010, having just watched the film for the second time. It seems that younger zetes was being a tad dumb, though it could have been the fact that he watched it on a VHS with probably washed-out subtitles (remember those? Yeah, I don't miss them!). The film is actually kind of convoluted, perhaps purposely so. But after the first third of the film, it's fairly clear what's going on. It is quite good, and the visuals and direction are spectacular. This is now available on DVD in an Eclipse box set (it's generally considered to be the best film in that set, too, though I've only watched a couple of films from it so far).