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"When love begins to sicken and decay..." Postwar Japan is a displaced boy in Manchuria, old feudalism continues in the family manor, a countryside abode like a haunted mausoleum. (As the severe grandfather, the black-robed Kei Sato is out of Nosferatu.) Some decades later, remembering the procession of violations and deaths, the adult scion (Kenzo Kawarasaki) reaches out to his cousin (Atsuko Kaku): "What are we?" "Relatives. Someone to see at weddings and funerals." Nagisa Oshima's autopsy of the national clan as a series of asphyxiating widescreen setups, with people pinned to tatami floors, benches, shrines. The camera tracks rigidly, as if pondering a vast casket's corners. Every rite is a heavy lid on an anguished cauldron: At a soiree where everybody must have a song, the combative cacophony ranges from the uncle's (Hosei Komatsu) mossy Communist Party hymns to the aunt's (Akiko Koyama) ode to traditional docility to the jingoistic braying of the war criminal's son (Kiyoshi Tsuchiya). Meanwhile, the protagonist has his ear pressed to the ground in hopes of hearing the heartbeat of the brother long ago buried alive. "You are not damned, but you'd like to be." The acerbic line of thought takes off from Ozu's Brothers and Sisters of the Toda Family and pushes beyond Kurosawa's The Bad Sleep Well, surface after imperial surface slashed for the rage and torment underneath. The institutional farce is carried through to its surreal end in the poker-faced banquet for the heir's arranged matrimony, with the ditched groom dutifully posed next to a vacant chair ("the bride's ectoplasmic veil," says Nabokov) before cuddling with a pillow on his honeymoon. For Oshima, the circular family tree of oppression can only conclude via negation, right at the edge where madness meets illumination. With Atsuo Nakamura, Fumio Watanabe, Nobuko Otowa, Rokko Toura and Shizue Kawarazaki.
--- Fernando F. Croce |