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The Rising Sun is a black slick on a red background behind the opening titles, it bursts into flame right before the director's name. Nothing for university students to do after the exam but stalk girls in the snow, they wander around with prurient thoughts and, like Chaplin in Modern Times, find themselves accidentally leading a demonstration. Pity for the young, "no politics, no panties, no oppression," says the sensei (Juzo Itami) who tells his pupils about the expressive dimension of ribald ballads. The next morning he's sprawled and asphyxiated, one of the lads (Ichiro Araki) may have something to do with it. The whole megillah of protests and slogans and semiotics and karaoke, Nagisa Oshima's "state of mind and the circumstances of the time." The wintry wasteland of Boy is already visible, here it's studded with salacious movie posters and Coca-Cola billboards. The feint is on Hitchcock's Rope, the teacher's definition of songs as "the suppressed voices of the people" is perverted into a soundtrack for the students' rape fantasies. Mysterious beauty (Kazuko Tajima) supine by the coffin, Korean coed (Hideko Yoshida) warbling a prostitute's lament, welcome changes in timbre from the monotonous horniness of boys. A splendidly sustained panning long-shot follows the strolling couple dwarfed by the cityscape at dawn, tiny figures discussing desire and modernity under a purplish haze. Pious hymns at the funeral, "This Land Is Your Land" and "We Shall Overcome" at the peace rally, "a special song to get into the spirit." It's all brought to bear on the paradoxical hope of nihilism when compared to the void of apathy, the imaginary violation made flesh while raunchy ditty and history lesson attempt to drown each other out in the classroom. With Akiko Koyama, Koji Iwabuchi, Kazuyoshi Kushida, Nobuko Miyamoto, Hiroshi Sato, and Hiroko Masuda.
--- Fernando F. Croce |