In Nagisa Oshima's bewildering study of sexual brutality, film itself gets jammed through the same inquiring prism as the characters. Completely reversing the take-stretching technique of Night and Fog in Japan, Oshima's outrageously disjunctive editing (nearly 2000 individual shots) looks back at October and Muriel while attempting to outdo both in cubist layering -- as in those movies, the spatial-temporal splintering (with scenes shattered through shots of varying angles, duration, and distance) denies stability and establishes the work as a shifting, churning, almost malefically living entity. The audacity of the style seeps into the story's tabloid luridness, tracing the links between a serial rapist and killer (Kei Sato) and two of his victims, a young maid (Saeda Kawaguchi) who half-reluctantly helps the police, and his trusting schoolteacher wife (Narumi Kayashima). Boldly obscure, the film extends the director's dismantling of Japanese societal oppression by shifting the focus to the nation's bucolic aspirations and finding them as tainted as the urban vistas of Cruel Story of Youth and The Son's Burial -- in Oshima's view, attempts at evoking its peasant roots, closer to nature, are stunted by a (specifically male) violence, a violence that renders the wife's myopic idealism foolish. A botched double suicide, repeatedly recalled and contemplated, gives the slippery structure the closest it has to an anchor, though the main stage gradually shifts from Sato's sweaty "monster" as the connection between the women solidifies. Oshima forges a complex bond between Kawaguchi and Kayashima via two bravura train sequences, with disorientating panning shots mingling memory, guilt, and identity. Yet it would be misleading to link the bleakly devastating Oshima to old-school feminist Mizoguchi, or even compare his heroines here to the rolling female vigor summoned up by fellow New Waver Shohei Imamura -- Kawaguchi, the sole survivor, carries no transforming new consciousness, only the idealist's corpse over her shoulder. Written by Taijun Takeda, from Takeshi Tamura's novel. With Rokko Toura. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
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