Muri shinjû: Nihon no natsu

I know a few of this man's films. They are among the richest experiences I know, but I was surprised at how deeply this one worked on me.

The surprise comes in part from knowing how specific his target audience was. I am the right generation but the wrong decade and culture. I recently encountered the effect with "Naisu no mori" which took some significant shifting on my part to put me in the right place.

Oshima is politically radical, violently iconoclastic and deeply critical of what he sees as a broken Japanese culture. In this film he targets sensibilities that would be hard for even Japanese viewers to understand today. I didn't even try, and simply relegated all the broken souls I saw to a generalized brokenness. Perhaps that makes the film better, because it allows us to experience the technique of the thing more directly.

The story doesn't matter except that it throws an eighteen year old girl with a "screw loose" in with a suicidal AWOL soldier and a group of ragtag gangsters. Some of the action takes place in an abandoned futuristic city, but the core of the film is in a bunker of some sort. It is a terrific set and one wonders how in the world many of the shots were made. Some of them pan the space, showing walls that could not have been there at the start of the shot.

It is a complex space, concrete, with sometimes deep, sometimes close walls that seem to change. The floors and ceilings have different heights. There are stone altar slabs with spring water coming from roughly hewn holes. Sometimes the walls and floors have handcarved human-shaped niches. The lighting always seems natural but the sources would be physically impossible. The space reminded me of Tarkovsky.

Oshima says he hates Ozu and Kurosawa, but the cameras of both clearly is used and extended here. The poses are formal, the movements of the eye architectural. This film was unknown to me until today, and it replaces Welles' Othello as my go to example of an architectural film. The characters are less people than they are active components of the space. Every action, every perception — ours and theirs — is spatially situated. I loved it. Mind you, this is in spite of missing the social commentary; some would think it was if I were watching a mimed Shakespearean play. But I think this film is in the eye, the space.

It is so extraordinary that I am giving it one of my coveted 4 ratings.

Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.

Combines the political commitment and narrative experimentalism of Godard with the lush, deep-focus aesthetic of Ford and Kurosawa.

I wouldn't know what to think of the film if I hadn't recently researched the U.S. occupation of Japan. Oshima presents Japanese youth as obsessed with matching the brutality and aimlessness of their American counter-parts.

When a sociopathic, loner American sniper attacks a Japanese city, the local gangs can't decide whether to react to him as a life-style savior or an imperialist invader.

Magnificently formal shot compositions that almost bring to mind the "Metaphyisical style" of de Cherico's paintings.

As is characteristic of Oshima, the only redemption is through sex.

Heretofore I've seen only a couple other movies from filmmaker Nagisa Oshima, 1976's 'In the realm of the senses' and 'Max, mon amour' from 1986. Wildly disparate as those two titles are, in the very least they make it clear that Oshima's interests are all over the place, and it seemed clear to me I could never know entirely what to expect. Still I'm surprised by this film, because I don't even rightly know how I could begin to describe it. In the most vague of terms one can say genre labels of "crime" and "drama" are applicable, yet far more than anything else this is flush with arthouse sensibilities of which it's difficult to really make any sense. It's very possible there is cultural context of which I'm totally ignorant that would help to shed some light on the proceedings, but the inclusions are so far flung I have a hard time particularly gleaning what 'Double suicide: Japanese' could earnestly portend.

There are scattered bits and pieces that seem to bear strong potential for film-making and/or storytelling, and are outstanding in and of themselves. The production design, art direction, and filming locations - the primary setting especially - are rich with possibilities. The odd assortment of characters, and fragments of the scenario, come across to me as elements that could be used to tell a fabulously engrossing story. Oshima's shot composition is exceptional, a fast for the eyes, and he orchestrates scenes with a tremendously deft hand. Yasuhiro Yoshioka's cinematography is extraordinarily, unusually dynamic, and superbly refreshing for the fact of it. Moreover, smaller facets like hair and makeup, costume design, props, weapons, and effects are all very well done. Though the ends to which their skills are employed are curious, I believe the cast all give fine performances. All this is well and good.

Yet even the costume design, and those varied characters, are summoned with no readily apparent rhyme or reason. The indistinct story seems to be going one direction at first as it proceeds to bunch itself into an amorphous jumble, then veers in an entirely different direction and remains just as indistinct as it began. Details in the primary setting, and outside of it, seem to change as the length progresses, and also bear no readily evident rhyme or reason. There are glimmers, at times, of a cohesive, unifying vision, themes and ideas to give shape to the whole and provide larger meaning to it all - an oblique treatise on violence, perhaps, on impulses and desires that even the desiring individual may not understand, and on despondent listlessness. Almost never do I read what others have written about a picture, as I feel the viewing experience is and should be in the eye of the beholder, but here I felt it necessary just to try to interpret what Oshima has created. In so doing, I think I'm in the right ballpark, even if I lack the context to fully appreciate it, and I at least partly understand where other cinephiles are coming from with their reactions, seeing 'Double suicide' as a rumination on Japanese society in light of the events of World War II. Yet all such glimmers are small, few, and far between, and it seems to me like the filmmaker deliberately strays so far from conventions of storytelling, or of basic communication of concrete Big Ideas, that even the foundations of the most intelligently penned interpretation seem somewhat flimsy. Or to put it a slightly different way: strong scene writing, and peculiar, wide-ranging dialogue, build a narrative that is complete, but much less than coherent, with overarching notions that are entirely present but surely out of reach for any but the most shrewd and well-read of audiences.

Perhaps my prior experiences with Oshima were the wrong background with which to step into this feature. 'Max, mon amour' and 'In the realm of the senses' are many things, but they also boast discrete, unmistakable plots. In contrast, plot is arguably the least of what this 1967 film represents. I've watched no few other titles in which purely artistic conveyance of stories and ideas was paramount, but still I'm hard-pressed to think of another example that strove so mightily to achieve such an extreme disparity between the normal, firmly cemented, and easily understandable ethos that it fervently rejects, and the abstruse, loosely shaped, and easily confounding ethos that it successfully seeks. It's not enough to say that this is a movie for the most ardent of cinephiles; this is a movie for those who are come prepared with specific knowledge, or who are otherwise prepared to plunge deep and drink heavily of whatever convolutions of substance a filmmaker may present. With all this said, I do like 'Double suicide: Japanese summer,' and I think it's worth watching. It's especially worthwhile for the utter magnificence of Oshima's direction, and the cinematography, and the craftsmanship and intelligence that otherwise went into it. I also find myself wondering if the man's deliberate obfuscation of his intentions didn't go too far, concealing the most earnestly significant value within a cloak of obscurity. Moreover, if a film cannot be so handily understood or appreciated when a viewer is divorced from a select context, is its overall worth diminished? These are questions for every prospective viewer to answer for themselves. By all means, please find this to watch, and do so - but be very aware of what you're getting into, and be prepared to actively engage on a level few features ever do.

This is possibly the best film Nagisa Oshima ever made; and one of the more accessible.

The film begins somewhere in the near future, in Japan. The streets and roads are empty of civilians, only the occasional police car or military squad march down the road.

Our protagonist, Nejiko, a attractive and frustrated adolescent is attempting to seduce policemen and soldiers; but none are interested, their busy fulfilling their duty. Nejiko eventually bumps into deserter soldier Otoko (played by Oshima regular Kai Sato) - he is also wandering around alone searching for something; unfortunately for Nejiko he isn't interested in sex, he wants to find someone to kill him. The pair end up getting taken to a secret compound by 'gangsters' who turn out to be members of a secret army plotting to overthrow the government.

The bulk of the film takes place in this military compound inside one of the sheds where Otoko, Nejiko and a group of mercenaries are waiting on orders (and weapons) from the leaders.

Unfortunately for the would-be revolutionaries a Westerner is driving throughout Japan in a car on a rampage sniping people; resulting in all the police and military being deployed trying to stop him; and he gets ever closer to the secret army's military base.

But whilst all the mercenary men discuss their past, their justification of violence, their favoured weapons, poor Nejiko just wants one of them to make love to her!

The film later on leaves the barracks and goes on a search with several members of the group.

The cinematography resembles Resnais' in Hiroshima Mon Amour, which is one of my favourite films, but I think this film beats it!

Oshima fills his film with a group of completely differing mysterious characters, forces them in close proximity to each other and observes them interacting often with explosive results. None really have importance over the other, and all are flawed.

For me, this film is about the search for Japanese pride after World War 2; and the absurd importance placed upon it above all others things. Oshima critiques each different group's reaction - the students, the police and army, the elderly, the war criminals, the businessmen.

Only the women are left uncriticised.. The one woman in the film, the only one brave enough to leave her home and get what she wants, just gets in the way of the men looking for their pride- ignoring the fact that a new Japan can only be brought about by the two coming together and starting anew.

A strange film, frankly difficult to interpret, especially for those who are not Japanese or share Oshima's radical cinematographic vision, in which sex and violence occupy a prominent symbolic place.

There are obvious clues. A strong influence of Godard and Resnais, the most hermetic and ideological representatives of the French New Wave. Rejection of Western and American violence, symbolized in the sniper, and the influence and fascination that this culture seems to exert in Japanese society, symbolized in gangs and in the young Japanese aspiring gunfighter. A visible moral decay in the young nymphomaniac or the sacrifice of the few who still uphold a moral integrity, which the suicidal deserter seems to symbolize.

Slightly dispersed ideas in a formally attractive but totally surreal work, in an avant-garde style without a true guiding thread that allows the viewer to read it clearly and safely.

There will be those who appreciate it, but it's certainly not my favorite type of cinematographic language.