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Top of the trash heap, "a national crisis." The sun is the orb on the imperial flag, on Osaka slum dwellers the solar hues look like radiation. Experience and youth as clashing gangs, reactionary old agitators on one side and amoral teenage bruisers on the other, bouncing between them is the ponytailed cynic (Kayoko Honoo) who "buys blood by day and sells flesh by night." Papa (Junzaburo Ban) laments the state of things while peeking under her dress, boys are rough (Koji Nakahara) or sensitive (Isao Sasaki) and more interested in each other than in her. Hoods, hookers, scroungers, slatterns in Nagisa Oshima's sweaty send-up of the Kurosawa cesspool (Drunken Angel, The Lower Depths), in the margins lies the militaristic rabble-rouser (Eitaro Ozawa) with a grenade in his pocket and visions of new wars. Stolen passports turn identities into part of the black-market traffic, bodies are literally thrown away in the garbage dump—a robbery victim is unceremoniously hurled into the river, a blubbering cuckold found hanging by the neck is readily frisked for cigarettes. The scorched industrial landscape lights up at night with neon, rigid lateral pans accentuate the limitations of the characters in rectangular compositions. (The Tsutenkaku Tower is visible in the distance, so is a sign wishing "love and hope for the young.") The scuffle that begins in open fields finishes on train tracks, a circling long-shot yields to frenzied crosscutting. The Threepenny Opera, Los Olvidados, Accattone. The blazing finale posits political decay bursting under Oshima's concentrated scrutiny, the pungent image has the heroine's hardened visage facing dawn amid the ashes. The sun's burial, or its modernist rebirth? With Masahiko Tsugawa, Fumio Watanabe, Kei Sato, Kamatari Fujiwara, and Rokko Toura.
--- Fernando F. Croce |