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Bravura agitprop vaudeville, through "the Gate of Hell" and into 1968 Japan. The execution complex, cell and waiting room and altar and chamber with noose, the camera dismantles it in tandem with the documentary mise en scène so that the clinical image becomes a mirror of falsehood. The Korean student (Do-yun Yu) is sentenced to hang but survives, greatly inconveniencing institutional figureheads. A new hanging is a fine mess ("We might be breaking the law..."), the amnesiac survivor must have his memory jogged so that his identity can be restored along with his sense of guilt—he must be reconstructed so he can be destroyed. Doctor, chaplain and warden scramble to reenact the boy's childhood, walls are plastered with newspapers to simulate a ghetto upbringing, the public prosecutor (Hosei Komatsu) observes from a window, haloed by the flag. (Monochromatic textures turn the Rising Sun into a black hole.) Performance is a vital tool of indoctrination, the education officer (Fumio Watanabe) grabs a passerby (Akiko Koyama) to show the prisoner his own crime: "See, you did this," he says over the violated body. Nagisa Oshima's astonishing revue registers Camus on the death penalty ("The instincts warring in man are not, as the law claims, constant forces in a state of equilibrium") in its contemplation of a revived conscience that refuses the verdict. "A good shock" is recommended for culture and medium alike, layer is stacked upon layer until the whole thing is pushed down a trapdoor. Prejudice and imperialism, justice and cinematic representation, Mizoguchi's female phantoms even. "The women of a race feel its sadness most deeply." The punchline is a "successful" execution, Nagisa thanks the audience for watching. "This may be a bit too abstract." Petri in Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion appreciates the form. With Kei Sato, Toshiro Ishido, Masao Adachi, and Rokko Toura. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |