|
The idealized maiden is "a well-adjusted teenage girl" (Mariko Kaga), her besotted tutor (Katsuo Nakamura) envisions her as a sliver of bridal white in a darkened widescreen. He kills for her and gets ditched all the same, the only witness is a crooked bureaucrat (Shoichi Ozawa) who blackmails him into hiding a suitcase while he's away in prison, 30 million yen in embezzled funds. The fortune comes in handy when he decides to embark on a nihilistic spree, planning to kill himself though not before approaching various lookalikes of his lost love with a curious offer: "I want to take my revenge on your body." "That's a new one." Ealing's Last Holiday, transformed by Nagisa Oshima into a procession of masochistic Vertigo scenarios that lay bare the fool's paradise of Japan's economic boom. Wife Number One (Yumiko Nogawa) is an aspiring model and Yakuza moll, her gilded cage is a blanched modernist flat invaded by the acid of jealousy. (The luxurious architectural void is later reflected in the tenacious foam of a marine vista.) Wife Number Two (Masako Yagi) already has a miserable husband, the virginal doctor (Hiroko Shimizu) wonders about the purpose behind the spending binge, "to defy my own absurd fate." Skin and flowers and bills in compositions of corroded glossiness, the inky vortex of the red-light district once the neon is turned off. Finally, the young streetwalker (Toshiko Higuchi), "mute and a little crazy" and not above stabbing her gangster pimp. Sex as futile rebellion and degraded commodity, a noir satire where the patsy is denied even death. "The empty suitcase will be my coffin." With Kei Sato, Rokko Toura, Akiji Kobayashi, Fumio Watanabe, and Hosei Komatsu.
--- Fernando F. Croce |