Massoud H
This film is so beautiful. I watched it in a film class, and I still keep returning to different elements, thinking of arts cinema.
Rated 5/5 Stars •
Rated 5 out of 5 stars
08/12/24
Full Review
CKB
In 1967 Nagisa Ōshima (speaking in the plural on behalf of his co-writers) wrote: "Our films are usually films of premonition. We take a lot of our material from the past and present; however, we don't use it to explain the past or present. We take material from the past and present only when it gives rise to our images of the future. At such times, the material already transcends its significance as material, becoming our images and projecting certain premonitions about the future to those who see the film. Thus, we are now trying to make exclusively premonitory films, and we consider all other films meaningless." In other words, Ōshima et al. are primarily interested in seeing where things are going – a very helpful clue for those of us bewildered by this man's films. Japanese Summer: Double Suicide is a mid-1960s meditation on how Japan would carry its traditional fascination with violent death into the post-war world. We are first introduced to Nekijo, an eighteen-year-old woman who thinks only of sex, but is constantly frustrated since most men are indifferent to her pushy charms, and the few who succumb to them provide her little real pleasure. She is drawn most to Otoko, apparently an AWOL soldier still wearing fatigues, who is obsessed with the idea of dying, and this makes him curiously fearless. Ōshima insists that Otoko does not really crave death, but embraces life as fully as the lusty Nekijo. Seeking a ‘comfortable' place for sex, they wind up on a bleak mudflat, where they are interrupted by militia men who dig up a box full of weapons. Since they have now seen too much, Otoko and Nekijo are marched back to the militia camp and locked in a detention room with some ‘lone wolf' men. This section feels like an existentialist play as the detainees express various nihilistic attitudes about weapons and killing. A militia man (thereafter dubbed ‘Television') brings in a TV that reports a mass shooter is terrorizing the country. This killer turns out to be foreign, a composite of Lee Harvey Oswald and the University of Texas sharpshooter who murdered 15 people in 1966. He is somewhere nearby, and a group of detainees decide to find him: Otaka wants the shooter for his executioner; ‘Television' wants to kill the shooter for fame; an old man and a teenager want to join in the shooter's anarchic violence, and Nekijo simply follows Otaka. Everyone gets caught in a last-stand shootout with the police, and Otaka and Nekijo finally consummate their passion in the double suicide promised by the title. As with Ōshima's other films, the viewer experiences plenty of frustrations and often wonders if the thing is worth watching to its end, yet afterwards discovers many ideas have been opened up by this experience that are worth pursuing. Sadly, Ōshima's mid-1960s premonitions apply all too well to our present culture of aimless, constant violence.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Grim Japanese-language film.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
02/27/23
Full Review
Audience Member
A description? Sure, ok. Teenage nihilism at it's most absurd. How about that? Sex, death, violence, all the good stuff that we all crave in our society since we have no mass wars to fight. If only we'd re-institute a draft and send hundreds of thousands of boys to go shoot someone and get killed. That'd fix their little red wagon.
Rated 4/5 Stars •
Rated 4 out of 5 stars
01/18/23
Full Review
Audience Member
Everyone should see the first 15 minutes of this. Fucking great. But after that you'll want to fall asleep. It devolves quickly into a pretentious stage play, essentially. You know the kind: a group of people in a bare set, stuck in a room. Everything is a metaphor for society. Zzz. But seriously the first 15 minutes or so kick fucking ass.
Rated 2.5/5 Stars •
Rated 2.5 out of 5 stars
02/19/23
Full Review
Audience Member
A girl interested only in getting laid (they could have used her in Sing a Song of Sex) and a man interested only in getting killed fall in with a strange assortment of "gangsters" interested only in violence. This movie is certainly radical and unusual, but I feel like Oshima -- again reminiscent of Godard -- wants to say something about the culture of violence more than he actually has something to say. What might be seen as an "outlaw" sensibility could also be seen as floundering for a point. However, it provides some interesting food for thought and if nothing else, its wildness is mostly entertaining.
Rated 3/5 Stars •
Rated 3 out of 5 stars
01/17/23
Full Review
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