Japanese Summer: Double Suicide
Director: Nagisa Oshima
Year Released: 1967
Rating: 1.0
It's Oshima-via-The Godard School once again, and once again it's a mixed-bag: a malcontent bent on killing himself and a girl bent on screwing anything with a penis get 'kidnapped' by rogues and locked in a basement; outside, there's an American gunman shooting people at random. The characters in this one are either not defined or defined by a single trait (the whore wants to whore, the one guy fixes the TV, another likes to stabby-stab) and the tone is fatalistic: Oshima's trying to stress Japan's (collective) lack of self-esteem, which I get, though his movie is naval-picking and self-absorbed. Oshima's generally been better off when he's exploring the intricacies of sexual mores, while his political films come across as being too simple to fully embrace.
