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The title is Resnais', Nagisa Oshima brings its sense of the inescapability of the past to a generation's aborted revolution. Couples in Japan marry either too early or too late, it is mentioned, the prowling camera ventures indoors to frame bride (Miyuki Kuwano) and groom (Fumio Watanabe) like a rigid portrait amid fierce lateral sprawls. The aging professor (Hiroshi Akutagawa) and the leader of the Socialist Party (Takao Yoshizawa) offer platitudinous toasts, the colleague turned fugitive (Masahiko Tsugawa) crashes the event with a j'accuse: "You call this a wedding? It's a funeral!" The left-wing's calcified situation circa 1960, with complex flashbacks to the committed fire a decade prior. Assemblies and demonstrations of the student movement, a freeze-frame on a flash amid red flags, a hopeful anthem that becomes a mocking motif. Sloganeering youths with dorm walls covered in scribbles ("Cogito ergo sum," "Pendre la bourgeoisie," "Das Kapital"), middle-class deserters in blasting spotlights and darkened voids. Polemical treaties and spy games, "Japan's been sold to the USA," the implacable tangle of history and memory. Oshima nearly a decade ahead of May '68 with a ghost story of political disillusionment, as estranged comrades materialize to confront "Stalinist zombies." (Godard helps himself to the uncanny lighting for Le Gai Savoir.) Shostakovich interludes ("the greatest socialist of all"), hospital bandages in the wake of a protest, infighting and compromises more damaging to the cause than imperialism. False nihilism like false optimism in an excoriating debate, "to take off our masks" is the goal. La Règle du jeu is called upon for the dénouement, thwarted rebels and the audience stranded outside with gathering mist and a drowned-out cry for unity. Cinematography by Takashi Kawamata. With Kei Sato, Rokko Toura, Shinko Ujiie, Ichiro Hayami, and Akiko Koyama.
--- Fernando F. Croce |