Erosu purasu gyakusatsu

The Japanese New Wave is one of my favorite cinematic movements, and this film comes recommended as one of the best of its era. Very unfortunately, it didn't do much for me at all. The one thing about it that I'll say right off the bat really impressed me was the cinematography. No time and place ever produced such gorgeous black and white movies, and this is up there with the best.

The film itself, though, is very slow-moving, kind of pretentious, and uninvolving. The story involves two timelines, one set in the Taisho period (starting in 1916) and the other in the present. It's about free love and the sexual revolution. In 1916, the philosopher Sakae Osugi practices and writes about free love. I'm pretty sure the Japanese word for philosopher translates literally in English to "aloof jerk," because this guy's version of free love is to screw around with different women and then say "Why can't you be chill about this?" when they confront him. In particular, Itsuko Masaoka becomes wildly jealous when he starts seeing Noe Ito on the side. She begins brandishing a knife, always threatening to get stabby with it. Late in the movie, there are like three consecutive sequences that take up a good quarter of the movie where she fulfills her promise.

The 1960s stuff involves two students who are studying Osugi. They have their own problems, but want to subscribe to the free love idea, which seems to be expanding around the world. At least in the director's cut, these segments take up only about a quarter of the film.

Look, I don't generally do well with long films, and perhaps this one's 3 hours and 36 minutes were just too daunting for me. The fact is, though, from the very beginning I was pretty bored with this one. 90% of the scenes just involve two or three people sitting around in a room bickering. I give Yoshida much credit for keeping it visually interesting throughout. The guy definitely has talent, but I wonder if this independently produced art film gave him too much freedom. Maybe he'd be better reigned in.

Whatever the case, I'm still perfectly happy to have this new Arrow Academy box set. Outside of Criterion, they're the best home video production company today. I hope I like the other two films better, and I hope one day I get to take a look at Yoshida's earlier, studio-produced films.

I was told I'd love this film. Instead I hated it. The only thing I liked was the creative cinematography but even that was overdone. There is two stories, one in the past and one in the present (1969 when this film was made) and most of the time when it switches from one to the other, it made little sense. In fact, most of this movie didn't make sense.

There was about ten minutes of story. A lot a time is spent on surreal photography. To much time. There is one scene or plotline they did like 7 or 8 different versions of. After the second or third time I really didn't care. The acting was good but I didn't care about the characters. The ending was an even larger disappointment. It didn't really tie things up.

After 3 and a half hours of this, was there a point to this movie? This was part of a trilogy and I'll skip the other two. You should skip all three.

Baffling and skillfully shot Eros + Massacre is far from easy to digest. A complex story with ton to explore and interpret. I feel frustrated that I have to see this film ones more to give it a faire rating, my concern though, is that it displays' more intelligent that it really is.

This one, plus Oshima's Koshikei (Death by Hanging, 1968), Matsumoto's Bara no Soretsu (Funeral Parade of Roses, 1969), Shinoda's Shinjû: Ten no amijima (Double Suicide, 1969) and Terayama's Den'en ni shisu (Pastoral : to Die in the Country, 1974), are maybe the great accomplishments of the Japanese New Wave. Here, Yoshida starts the last political trilogy about Japanese Past and Present (Eros plus Massacre, Heroic Purgatory and Coup D'etat) using a distinctive aesthetics proving that his Cinema contains some sort of a Metamorfosical ethic.

In fact, the movie builds an omnipresent dialectic between spectator and characters. History and Symbolic Representation. According to Pascal BONITZER, the "plus" of the tittle is a metonymy for the movie relation and revelation: "You must play too, because you can't dominate it. You must attach, dis-attach, and transform one and another: «Eros» and «Massacre». The spectator is the local of application. The spectator is the plus (+)."

Just about any film that exceeds 3.5 hours in length is going to be a challenging watch, but this one even more so. Eros + Massacre loosely follows a real-life free-thinking radical (who talks big but doesn't actually do much, at least in the movie) whose life is complicated by the fact that he's in a relationship with three different women. Other scenes follow two young people in the 1960s, who talk about this historical figure, have an obsession with fire, and similarly have lofty ideas but lack the know-how or resources to rebel their way they want to. The characters from the past and (then) present also collide at points, in strange and surreal ways.

It's hard to read into exactly what the movie's going for. I'd want to assume it's being critical of its characters for the most part, or maybe satirical about revolutionaries/radicals who say they want change but stay stuck in their ways? Honestly, this film's so overwhelming I could be way off.

It makes for an interesting watch, though. I've never seen anything else quite like it. Without a doubt, it's also beautiful to look at. There's very little going on visually that looks ordinary or traditional, and some very ambitious camerawork and bizarre yet compellingly framed shots throughout.

As sacrilegious as it sounds, if I revisit this one day, I might watch the 160-minute version, even if the 3.5-hour one is the director's cut. At about the 165-minute mark was where I felt my attention start to wane a little bit, in all honesty.

(Also RIP to the film's director, Yoshishige Yoshida. Just so happened to watch this the day it was announced he passed away, at age 89).