Eros + Massacre

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.

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 (+)."

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.

In the 20's, the anarchist revolutionary Sakae Osugi (Toshiyuki Hosokawa) is financially supported by his wife, the journalist Itsuko Masaoka (Yûko Kusunoki) and spends his time doing nothing but philosophizing about political systems and free love and shagging his lovers Yasuko (Masako Yagi) and the earlier feminist Noe Ito (Mariko Okada). He conveniently defends three principles for a relationship between a man and a woman: they should be financially independent (despite he is not); they should live in different places; and they should be free to have intercourse with other partners.

In the present days (1969), the slut twenty year-old student Eiko Sokuta has an active sexual life having sex with different men. She has a freak friend named Wada (Daijiro Harada) that is obsessed for fire and they usually play weird games using a camera while they read about Osugi and Ito.

"Erosu Purasu Gyakusatsu" a.k.a. "Eros Plus Massacre" has just been released in Brazil and I immediately bought this DVD for my collection. Unfortunately I can not understand the hype surrounding this film, and I was absolutely disappointed after watching it. The cinematography and framing are wonderful; the angles of the camera are unconventional; the acting is great; however the messy and prolix screenplay ruin the good aspects of this feature.

The cult director Yoshishige Yoshida is unable to use an adequate narrative for entwining two parallel stories, one of them based on a true story of a man and three women ahead of the time living a free love among them in times of repression, and an empty couple in the late 60's when the movement of free love is worldwide. Yoshida does not develop the background of the Japanese society in the 20's and limits to the repetitive situations of jealousy and despair of the women in love. After 210 minutes running time (the DVD has intermission), the boring and never-ending story is not totally clear for the viewer. This feature should have been edited and reduced of at least 120 minutes since the situations are very repetitive. Last but not the least, the actress that performs Eiko is very sexy and beautiful, but her name is not listed in IMDb. My vote is four.

Title (Brazil): "Eros + Massacre"

The opening sequence is framed an cut in such a modern way that you would think that you are in a movie of the present. It totally graps your attention and doesn't let go till the end.

If you have any chance to see this movie in the original 202min. cut - use it !!