★ 8 / 10
A terrifically framed film that hits hard with
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A terrifically framed film that hits hard with a message of irrational indulgence that still rings true to this day.
A terrifically framed film that hits hard with a message of irrational indulgence that still rings true to this day.
★ 4 / 10
What a strange movie experience -- director Nagisa
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What a strange movie experience -- director Nagisa Oshima employs a beautiful visual style in a movie that is filled with talk, talk, talk. Why clog up a…
What a strange movie experience -- director Nagisa Oshima employs a beautiful visual style in a movie that is filled with talk, talk, talk. Why clog up a fundamentally visual medium with so much exposition? Add to this a plot which revolves around the tawdry downward spiral of a man obsessed with the wrong woman in a supposedly ‘pink' film that approaches sexual relationships with clinical coldness.
Atsushi, a young tutor who has fallen in love with his childish teenaged student Shoko, winds up murdering a vile man who had sexually abused her and is now trying to blackmail her parents. Atsushi pledges to not tell Shoko, but now he has a secret to conceal. Sure enough, a man shows up who witnessed the murder, and offers a strange deal: he won't go to the police if Atsushi keeps a suitcase full of money for five years, untouched, until the man gets out of jail (he's expecting to get caught, but the money is worth it). In the meantime Shoko has married, leaving Atsushi with the dumb idea that he will live his life out alone and miserable. What's with this guy?
Director Oshima employs a device throughout in which we see Atsushi's fantasies as real, and now presents us with a confusing scene in which Shoko appears at Atsushi's apartment to declare she is miserable in her marriage, and apparently wants to be with Atsushi. Except when he offers to use his suitcase of money for them to live in happiness, she says something about her life being ruined, and then Atsushi is talking apparently to himself about how he'll spend the next year spending up all this money, then killing himself to avoid punishment. And what will he spend it on? Women! We don't know if Shoko was ever really there, or if this all happened inside Atsushi's head.
Now the tawdry part begins, as nerdy Atsushi clumsily buys women who remind him of Shoko to live with him, offering them too much money to refuse. The first is a gangster's woman who works the situation to gain her freedom from everyone. The next is a woman married to a loser who Atsushi enjoys abusing until he realizes she loves misery. Next is a hard-headed intellectual doctor who tortures him by withholding her body from him. Last is a sweet deaf-mute prostitute, the only one who seems to simply want him without games, but this relationship is also doomed from the start. This strange exercise in empty relationships comes full circle with an appropriate O. Henry-style ending.
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★ 10 / 10
The first time I saw this film I
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The first time I saw this film I hated it, but I sensed there was something there. The second time I saw it I enjoyed it. It's a film about a man who is…
The first time I saw this film I hated it, but I sensed there was something there. The second time I saw it I enjoyed it. It's a film about a man who is literally insane, I didn't understand that the first time. There are reasons why he loses his sanity. It's a bizarre, surreal, half crime, half horror film that was surprisingly made in Japan in 1965 by an outcast director who formed his own studio to make it. It's clearly a cult film. I won't delve in the bizarre story. Suffice to say the man has hallucinations. There is an amazing scene near the end. I want to believe it's real (not a hallucination) but there is no way of knowing for sure. That's part of the greatness of this film. Lots of perverted and decadent Japanese in this film- people who are not insane and should know better but are thoroughly corrupted by the power of money. You see, the insane man has 30 million Yen to spend in one year, how he gets the money, why he gets the money and his initial fear of the money is what makes him insane.
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62%
AUDIENCE
· 100 ratings
6.9/10
1.8K
