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"Be more serious," orders the squeaky novelty ditty in the sky. A day at the beach, three students (Kazuhiko Kato, Osamu Kitayama, Norihiko Hashida) reenact the grimace of the Vietcong prisoner executed in Eddie Adams' famous photo before a dip in the ocean, a hand reaches from under the sand to filch their clothes. Korean fatigues are left in their place, bad news for them since it's "Crackdown on Stowaways Week." Arrest and deportation, death in the battlefield or on the toilet. Rinse and repeat, literally. "If this were a movie, a girl would come running into my arms now." "Yeah, if it were by some stupid Japanese director." War and xenophobia get the grim slapstick they deserve, courtesy of Nagisa Oshima at his most scabrously antic. (Lester's How I Won the War is made into a useful point of departure, and there's rare appreciation for Lewis' mise en scène in The Big Mouth.) Immigrants on the lam (Kei Sato, Cha Dae-Sun) exchange uniforms and identities, the bathhouse sprite (Mako Midori) points the way, her father-husband-pimp (Fumio Watanabe) salutes with a hook hand—the lads face it all with dazed cheekiness and the dawning awareness that they're characters in a narrative that's just reset itself midway through and started over. "Such a short-lived romance!" A comic pendant to Death by Hanging, a blur of Ionesco and Termite Terrace, a second chance for youth. "Now for the grand finale in Tokyo," where the terror behind the cartooning turns shatteringly clear. Rivette refines the structure for the analytical screwball of Céline and Julie vont en bateau. With Masao Adachi, Taiji Tonoyama, and Hosei Komatsu.
--- Fernando F. Croce |