PIERRE ETAIX: LE GRAND AMOUR/HAPPY ANNIVERSARY - #655

If you're unfamiliar with the name Pierre Étaix, don't worry, you're not alone. Up until recently, the celebrated French comedian's films have been largely unavailable due to a legal tangle with the distribution rights. I don't know the particulars of what finally caused those rights to be untangled, but soon all film fans will have a chance to get to know Étaix's artistry, thanks to a touring retrospective of his work and an upcoming Criterion boxed set.

The writer/director/star only made a handful of feature films and shorts through the 1960s, following stints as an assistant and gag writer for the likes of Jacques Tati, Robert Bresson, and Nagisa Oshima. Étaix left film to return to his first career as a clown, but not before leaving an indelible mark on the cinematic landscape. In reviewing his final comedy feature, Le Grand Amour, released in 1969 and leading the dual weekend of Pierre Étaix films playing the NW Film Center [full schedule here], it's easy to see why. His playful flights of fancy, careening out of conventional narrative and into the realms of imagination, are delightful and intoxicating. One can't help but imagine that movies like Le Grand Amour were an early influence on Jean-Pierre Jeunet, whose Amélie would not be out of place as one of the many girlfriends Pierre fantasizes about throughout this rumination on love and marriage. (Etaix actually had a small role in Jeunet's film Micmacs [review].)

Le Grand Amour begins with a wedding, as befitting any such movie. Étaix is at the altar, waiting to tie the knot with Florence (Annie Fratellini), and remembering his past loves and imagining a few paths not taken. The ceremony ends, and the film jumps ahead a decade. Pierre and Florence have settled into their married life, with all the ups and downs that entails. They are mostly happy, despite the gossip that's being passed around about them. In one ingenious sequence, Étaix shows the evolution of a rumor, as a chance greeting is soon inflated into a full-grown affair, the moment replaying and escalating with each added whisper. Pierre takes some lumps for this false story, before falling into a similar trap for real. He becomes quite smitten with his new secretary (Nicole Calfan), despite her being 20 years his junior.

The rest of Le Grand Amour shows Pierre trying to concoct a way to have the young girl and be free of his wife. He lives out the illicit, though amusingly tame, relationship in dreams, both of the sleeping and waking variety, debating the pros and cons. One amusing scene shows him obsessing over a strand of hair left on his desk, going back and forth between it and a portrait of his bride. It's one of the more straightforward segments of the film; other bits break the bounds of reality. When Pierre consults with a friend, that man becomes a part of the daydream, often to have his own speculations backfire (pie to the face!) because he doesn't understand Florence the way her husband does.  In Le Grand Amour's most memorable stretch, Pierre's bed leaves his room and goes out onto the open road, joining the traffic of other slumbering dreamers as he searches for the object of his affection. The beds, in their way, have become cars, and Étaix ups the ante by having their drivers suffer from engine trouble, crash into one another, and other mundane experiences normally reserved for regular metal automobiles.

Étaix is a charming presence. His approach, at least here, is quieter than the likes of Tati or Rowan Atkinson, who bears a slight resemblance to the French comic. Le Grand Amour has some slapstick, but it's mostly situational. Étaix prefers mix-ups to pratfalls. His pacing is more languid, as befitting a dreamer. The laughs are subtle and unforced. Some jokes sneak up on you, such as when Étaix leaves his apartment to go downstairs and hang up on his mother-in-law in person. In that same scene, the strains of violin that have been playing under the action are revealed to be coming from a live player, Pierre's henpecked father-in-law. The comedian otherwise doesn't use music to emphasize his punch lines, that would be too obvious. Étaix lets the humor happen, he doesn't telegraph.

This allows for a cleverly ironic ending, one that maybe I should have seen coming, but that is funny enough to transcend cliché. Suffice to say, Pierre learns to appreciate what he has, only to find himself becoming jealous via the same kind of speculation that already bit him on the butt once.

It should probably be noted here that the majority of Étaix's films were co-written by Jean-Claude Carrière, a prolific screenwriter who also worked with Luis Buñuel on most of his movies through the 1960s and 1970s and who also worked on the script for Schlöndorff's adaptation of The Tin Drum. The Étaix/Carrière collaboration dates all the way back to the clown's earliest film efforts, including his second short, Happy Anniversary (1962), which makes for a nice thematic pairing with Le Grand Amour (probably why the NW Film Center is showing them together). In this black-and-white comedy, Pierre Étaix plays a husband trying to get home for his anniversary dinner, only to end up stuck in traffic and himself causing further disruptions for his fellow drivers as he tools about running errands. Some of the on-the-road humor, as we ping from car to car, traveler to traveler, is reminiscent of Tati's Trafic [review], which was still over a decade away.

VENGEANCE IS MINE - #384

After spending the early 1970s making documentary films detailing the displacement felt by many varied Japanese citizens following World War II (beginning with his landmark A Man Vanishes, ending with Karayuki-san, the Making of a Prostitute [both reviewed here]), innovative director Shohei Imamura returned to narrative storytelling with a film that is as cold, calculated, and irreverent as its subject, a sociopath as lost and disappointed as any of the veterans or victims Imamura profiled in his nonfiction work.

Reality is also a basis for Vengeance is Mine, though the presentation of the facts is a bit fast and loose. Masaru Baba, who also wrote the existential yakuza picture Pale Flower [review], based his screenplay on a true crime novel by Ryuzo Saki. The story follows killer Iwao Enokizu (Ken Ogata, Mishima [review]), a small-time con man who went on a five-person killing spree, eluding police for over two months. Vengeance is Mine begins after he has been arrested, and it follows a circuitous route through his confession, weaving around different points in the investigation, backtracking to cover the killer's history, and also splintering off to follow what happens to his immediate family and two women, a mother (Nijiko Kiyokawa) and daughter (Mayumi Ogawa), who run an inn where Enokizu ends up staying. There, he poses as a professor. In one of his other assumed identities, he is a lawyer. In reality, he is nothing so erudite. He is a common laborer with pretensions of something higher. Before he turns homicidal, Enokizu is actually working as a truck driver.

Two other truck drivers are his first victims. One of them he knows, the other he doesn't. He kills them without much emotion, immune to their pleas for mercy, improvising the deaths as he goes. There is a comical pause between the separate slayings when Enokizu goes to buy a knife for the second man. When faced with more than one option, he opts for the cheapest blade. No use spending more than necessary. There is a haphazard practicality to all the murders. His third victim seems to mostly be chosen because Enokizu can hide in the old man's apartment. Another macabre joke: Enokizu befriends this man, a real barrister, pretending to be visiting the jailhouse to buy property from a prisoner. The lawyer offers to help broker the transaction.

He chooses the last of his five victims for a variety of reasons: he has worn out his welcome at the inn, they've gotten too close and/or know too much, and, by the looks of it, an irresistible compulsion takes command of his faculties. Also, as Iwao himself explains it, these women, and really all the victims, posed no threat, and thus they were ideal targets. The pathology of this serial killer, pointed out both by his father (Rentaro Mikuni, Harakiri [review]) and the mother of the inn's proprietress (who in years past committed murder herself), is to only go after victims who offer no resistance and who have done him no real offense. The armchair psychology would be that a young Iwao Enokizu, having witnessed his father humiliatingly kowtow to a bullying naval officer, lost faith in Japanese authority, yet became psychologically crippled by the experience. He is impotent to attack anyone who wields any power over him, meaning that he can't even strike back at the one person whom he really wants to destroy: his old man. Father Enokizu gives him plenty of reason to want him dead. Theirs is a complicated relationship with Oedipal overtones, exacerbated by an overly close connection between the older man and his daughter-in-law (Mitsuko Baisho).

Where then is the vengeance? Enokizu's rampage is one with no obvious purpose. His victims are chosen at random, their deaths prove no point. When the cops press him, the killer has no great statement to make, he's not even really interested in explaining himself. He's ready to accept the death penalty, his run was basically an elaborate "suicide by cop" scheme. I suppose one could argue that this dishonorable death is a repudiation of the old ways, of the near-mythic image of samurai self-immolation. Yet, my interpretation is that Enokizu's intentions are both more broad and more personal, and his success is revealed in the bizarre coda at the end of Vengeance is Mine.

Picking up the story five years after the murders, Imamura shows us the father-in-law and Enokizu's wife, Kazuko, heading up a mountain to discard Enokizu's bones. He has been excommunicated from the Catholic church--a fact Imamura reminds us of by showing a group of nuns in the aerial tram going down while the elder Enokizu and Kazuko are in an opposing tram going up (ironically)-- so Iwao can no longer be buried in consecrated ground. Instead, his surviving family decides to toss his bones from the mountain. Only, every time they throw one bone out, it freezes in mid-air, hanging there, never dropping. It's a metaphor for all the damage he has done to them. He has ruined the Enokizu name, destroyed their reputations, upended their lives, ensuring that they will never be free of him. True happiness will always be denied his so-called loved ones, because they'll never escape the terrible crimes he committed.

Backing up for a second, though, it's worth considering this idea of the murder spree as an elaborate suicide. In his final conversation with his dad, the same conversation where Iwao Enokizu finds out that he has been kicked out of the church, he also rejects God. He says he has no need for God, implying that he has taken over the role of Supreme Being himself. "'Vengeance is mine,' sayeth the Lord;" except now Enokizu has claimed vengeance as his own. From an existential standpoint--though a particularly bleak reading of the philosophy--he is asserting his true essence as a man by rejecting the boundaries of outside morality, breaking common law, and accepting the consequences. Like in Albert Camus' The Stranger, when Meursault kills the Arab. Imamura's film is divided into the same basic narrative chunks as Camus' novel: during the crime and after the crime. Though where Camus splits them evenly, Imamura shuffles them up.

The way Vengeance is Mine is put together is strangely dichotomous. The film is anarchic, yet it has the exacting approach of a procedural. Imamura is quick to orient his audience in the timeline, giving us dates and catching us up on developments via title cards. There is very little abstraction, most of the film is shot with a straightforward aesthetic, it's only in the editing that things get jumbled. (The photography is by Imamura's regular cameraman Shinsaku Himeda; the cutting is by Nagisa Oshima's editor, Keiichi Uraoka.) As I suggested at the outset, though, this reflects the personality of the protagonist. The timeline is scattered, but there is also a clarity. Iwao Enokizu kills on impulse, but he is increasingly exacting.

Ken Ogata turns in an outstanding performance as Enokizu. He is charming, even when unhinged, ready with a laugh and possessed of a gift of gab. At the same time, he moves as if there is always a forcefield around him, as if he is aware of every atom darting around his immediate vicinity. Passion only ever overtakes him when he is having sex, when he indulges his animal nature. Actually, it might be that sex is another outlet to impose his will on a victim who has done him no harm, though this time one that willingly accepts his punishment (even if it's for money). It could be telling that the one person who fends him off is the mistress who, when he tries to get rough with her, threatens to cut his testicles off, sending him running.

It's also telling, and eerily apropos, that this fugitive should, at a crucial point in Vengeance is Mine, be exposed by cinema. The last piece of the puzzle is Haru, the woman from the inn, discovering the truth, and she does so during what is maybe the only romantic sequence in the film. They are on a date, out at the movies, and the newsreel shows her the real face of her companion. It makes me think of the famous story of John Dillinger being tracked down and shot while taking in the flickers with his girl. Though no cops wait for Enokizu outside the theater, he is seen by a second person, an agent of the law, whom he has lied to when he rejoins the throngs of people on the streets of Tokyo. It's the cinematic truth that Imamura has been hunting for. In the motion picture era, the camera will always see you, and the audience will be there waiting to peep on your undoing.

Note: I have now also published a follow-up review for the 2014 Blu-ray edition.

EMPIRE OF PASSION - #467

Respected Japanese film director Nagisa Oshima died at the beginning of this week. He was 80 years old. Part of the Japanese New Wave that took over cinema in the 1960s, Oshima was known for his bold flaunting of social mores. His films detailed obsessions of all kinds, though his own main obsession was exploring sexual desire.

I was not a fan of all of his films, so deciding to review the only movie of his left in the Criterion Collection that I had not seen was a risky proposition. I didn't want what should be a tribute to end up being a hatchet job. As luck would have it, his 1978 Cannes prizewinner Empire of Passion turned out to be my favorite of what I've seen. By embracing a more typical genre story, Oshima found a nice balance between traditional storytelling and the extreme impulses that made me think some of his other work was a tad adolescent. Here he manages to walk a carefully drawn line, spinning a good yarn while also addressing his usual thematic concerns and even finding room for at least one shocking scene. This disturbing occurrence--and you'll know it when you see it--is all the more startling for its late arrival, and for standing out as the one time in the when film the auteur strikes for the eyes--both literally and metaphorically.

Empire of Passion is a ghost story set in a remote village of Japan at the very end of the 19th-century. Humble rickshaw driver Gisaburo (Takahiro Tamura) is married to Seki (Kazuko Yoshiyuki), a waitress who, despite being middle-aged, has retained her youthful beauty. They have two kids together--a toddler and a teenaged daughter, Shin (Masami Hasegawa). Shin lives away from home and, like her mother before her, works as a nanny.

Seki also has an admirer, the recently discharged soldier Toyoji (Tatsuya Fuji, Black Sun [review]; In the Realm of the Senses [review])--though she doesn't actually realize that's even a possibility until Gisaburo makes a joke about it. Up until then, she assumed the young man, who is half her age, has been visiting with treats because he is lonely and likes her company. While this is still true, there is also more to his attentions, and when a drunken Toyoji finally decides to act on his desires, Seki gives in. Unfortunately, this is not enough for the young hothead. He is jealous of Seki's relationship with her husband, and he drags Seki into a plot to kill Gisaburo so he can have Seki all to himself. They strangle the older man and toss him in a well, telling the rest of the townspeople that he has gone to work in Tokyo.

Three years pass amidst much gossip, but it's all just speculation until Gisaburo's ghost starts showing up around town. This unnerves Seki, who is undone further when a police officer (Takuzo Kawatani) comes to town to start investigating the rumors. Toyoji, whom so far the specter has avoided, tells his lover to play it cool, but there is no putting this string back on the spindle. Everything is unraveling.

Empire of Passion was shot by cinematographer Yoshio Miyajima, who also photographed Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan, one the spookiest and most artful Japanese horror movies ever made. While Oshima's ghost story is neither as surreal nor as lush as Kobayashi's, Miyajima captures some of the same otherworldliness. Gisaburo appears as a pale figure, painted an ashen color, undeterred by doors and walls. In one memorable scene, he forces his wife into his ghostly rickshaw and takes her on roads she doesn't recognize, claiming to have forgotten the way home. When she tries to stop him, his features disappear, and he becomes a faceless apparition reminiscent of the dream figures the old professor sees in Ingmar Bergman's Wild Strawberries. It's a great pit stop on the way to full-blown madness.

If sexual urges compelled Seki and Toyoji to murder, then it's fitting that the crime not only makes it impossible for them to be a real couple, but also that the haunting pushes them further apart. Their celibacy is a consequence of their guilt, and the closer they get to the truth coming out, the hornier they become. Oshima has structured his story to have a delicious symmetry. Hoping to recapture happier days, Toyoji proposes role-playing where he and Seki pretend they are just as they were before they first gave in to their lust. This grotesque reset plays essentially just as it did the first time, but only now their true natures are exposed and they can't cover them up again. Like Adam and Eve eating of the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge and realizing they are naked, the killers can't bring their victim back to life and rekindle their passion. They both revert to something primal, driven only by impulse, and punished for their lack of discretion.

Unsurprisingly, the judgmental folks around the killers are just as bad as the people they would condemn. All are driven by passion in some way, be it the gossipy villagers who thrive on their scandal or the police officer who resorts to torture to get confessions out of Seki and Toyoji, succumbing to barbaric tactics he previously claimed to be above. Their empire claims him and his inhibitions, no matter how pure he tries to remain, no matter how white his uniform. There is poetic justice in Oshima's scheme, then, when a chill settles over the town after their would-be king and queen are removed. The final shot of Empire of Passion is of Toyoji's brother, the village idiot, alone in the snow, fighting against some invisible presence. He carries on chasing ghosts, and he represents them all, still haunted by what happened.

And chances are, when you finish watching, it's this image that will haunt you, too.

MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE (Blu-Ray) - #535

1942. A Japanese prison camped for Allied POWs captured in Korea and other parts of Southeast Asia. This is the setting for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Nagisa Oshima's 1983 film of hidden desires behind the barbed-wired fences.

Tom Conti leads the film as Colonel John Lawrence, a British officer with some expertise and experience in Asia. His ability to speak Japanese makes him a valuable liaison between the prison guards and their prisoners, even if it does make some of the other men suspicious. At the start of the movie, Lawrence is roused from sleep by the gruff-voiced Sgt. Gengo Hara (Takeshi Kitano in an early role; he is billed as simply "Takeshi"). One of Hara's men (Johnny Okura) has been caught in a compromising position with a Dutch prisoner (Alistair Browning), and Hara wants Lawrence to both translate for the victim and be witness to what happens. Hara would like to punish his soldier without involving his commander, the aloof Captain Yonoi (musician Ryûichi Sakamoto). Homosexuality is not to be tolerated, particularly if the captor forced himself on the captive.

Yonoi does end up stumbling into the situation, but he has little time for it. He is on his way to base where a tribunal has been called to deal with another captured Brit. Major Jack "Strafer" Celliers (bleached-hair, Let's Dance-era David Bowie) was engaging in what was apparently some pretty effective guerilla warfare before he ran afoul of the Japanese army, and his lack of cooperation now that he is in their hands has confounded the top brass. Yonoi is brought in for some outside perspective--only his superiors don't know how far outside it is. In one of the least subtle "falling in love" scenes you can imagine, Oshima shows Yonoi as hypnotized by the blonde-haired grunt. The music swells, the camera pushes in, Yonoi is transfixed. Benefit of the doubt, maybe Oshima was purposely playing on old-fashioned romance conventions. Regardless, we get the point.

Unsurprisingly, Yonoi takes Celliers back to his prison camp, where his fixation doesn't go unnoticed. Not by Lawrence, Hara, or even Celliers himself. Yonoi tries to show off for his crush; he practices his sword fighting where the convalescing prisoner can hear his grunts and moans. For his part, Celliers becomes a subversive element in the camp, particularly when he challenges Yonoi's orders for a period of fasting by going out and picking edible flowers for his bunkmates. Again, the romantic imagery is pretty clear, though this colorful display is far more effective. If I had a still of the scene, I would caption it like a title from a Bullwinkle cartoon: "Make Love, Not War; or, Gather Ye Rosebuds While Ye May."

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is a strange picture. It is based on the memoirs of a real prisoner of war, Laurens Van der Post, though the script by Oshima and Paul Mayersberg (The Man Who Fell to Earth, The Last Samurai
) more strongly resembles a Yukio Mishima novel. Like Mishima, the story is concerned with honor and how men conduct themselves in structured situations. Suppressed passions rise up in strange ways, and on a symbolic level, homosexuality is equated with a physical deformity. Not as a value judgment, mind you, both Oshima and Mishima had a broad sexual view, but as something to be hidden lest you be judged. In Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, we see Celliers' early life and his young brother (James Malcolm), who had a hump on his back. Celliers tells Lawrence how he was too morally weak to stand up for his sibling when the pack victimized him, something he considers to be his greatest failing; the events at the POW camp will at long last provide him an opportunity for redemption.

There's a lot of strong stuff in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence. The complexity of the drama and the psychology of the characters is fascinating. Lawrence forms an unexpected bond with both Hara and Celliers, driven together by the odd behavior of Yonoi. The Captain's own secret shame ends up connecting to how he finally deals with the alleged rapist (there's some question of what really happened), and he masks his sexual frustration further by trying to assert military dominance over his prisoners. Oshima fumbles again here, playing the movie's climactic moment a little too obviously. Any time a filmmaker shifts into slow-mo to emphasize the important action, they are just asking for trouble. Much of the storytelling in Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is both clumsy and old-fashioned, with narrative jumps making some crucial plot points come off as out of joint. Also, the musical score by Ryûichi Sakamoto, which features a lot of '80s synthesizer, is dated and anachronistic. I found it distracting.

Thankfully, the acting is uniformly solid, and this allows the material to rise over any bad directorial choices. As a reviewer, I use the word "solid" a lot, and in this case, I really mean it. There is a consistency to the performances in the movie that is almost as level as a cement slab. Conti, Bowie, and Sakamoto are all good, but unremarkable. Only Takeshi Kitano stands out. He is possessed of a more natural screen charisma than the others, and the camera is magnetically drawn to his orbit. It's no surprise he went on to better things.

Original Theatrical Poster

Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence has an impressive final act. The fate of Celliers is macabre, and despite the panting earnestness of the early scenes, Oshima knows that repressed emotions are more effective in this case than any sweaty relief would ever be. Mr. Lawrence is a sad film, one where there is no clear line between right and wrong, and thus no satisfaction for anyone. The melancholy denouement neatly encapsulates all the things the rest of the film touches on: war is destructive, and it causes men to act in ways that are against their nature. The cultures that have been clashing finally get a moment's peace, and they eventually understand each other in some fashion--even if it is only two men, they represent some part of the whole.

Though not a masterpiece, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence is an intriguing film. Given the current debate over "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" in the United States Senate, there are even political elements to it that are still relevant. It's hard to say if they are any less progressive now then they were nearly thirty years ago. At one point in the movie, Hara says that, to a samurai, there is no gay or straight, there are just men on the battlefield. Why hang yourself up with worries about anything else? It's a code of honor well worth adopting.

This is the first time that Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence has come to any kind of digital disc in the United States, and Criterion does it up right for their Blu-Ray release. The 1080p high-definition transfer (1.78:1 aspect ratio) has lots of impressive detail. Outdoor scenes look especially good, with vibrant colors and a tremendous clarity. You can practically stop and count the blades of grass. Darker scenes have a little more graininess, as do wider shots. This appears to be the nature of how the film was shot, however, as the transitions seem natural. The overall image appears to be very true to the original intent of the filmmakers.

The bilingual soundtrack is presented here as a DTS-HD Master. The stereo mix creates a nice interspeaker balance with the original audio, creating a decent amount of depth even with a simple 2.0 range.

SIDE NOTE: I was actually surprised to find some fan art online for Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, of which the above, by an artist who goes by the moniker Pudding, is the best (original location). Some of it is humorous, some of it a little pervy, most of it done in a manga/anime style. That would suggest the movie has a fairly strong cult following. Use Google image search and nose around for some more if you want.

More surprising is this music mash-up called "Forbidden Young Folks," which combines the vocals from Peter Bjorn & John's "Young Folks" with Ryûichi Sakamoto's melancholy theme from the film.

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full review at DVDTalk.

OSHIMA'S OUTLAW SIXTIES - ECLIPSE SERIES 21

Continuing its tradition of focusing on specific filmmakers at distinct points in their careers, Criterion's Eclipse Series has gathered together five films by Japanese provocateur Nagisa Oshima. Made between 1965 and 1968, Oshima's Outlaw Sixties is a profile of the controversial director as he broke away from the studio system in Japan and started making complex and daring narrative/anti-narrative films that explored taboo subjects and extreme reactions to modern life under his own umbrella. "Provocateur" is not a term I use lightly in this case, Oshima was part of a rebellious zeitgeist. Referred to early on as "the Japanese Godard," his cinematic explorations were of a similar mindset to the Nouvelle Vague crowd, and his independent spirit was in line with what John Cassavetes was doing in New York. Cinema was changing worldwide, and Nagisa Oshima was one of the flashpoints.

Oshima's Outlaw Sixties begins with the intriguingly titled Pleasures of the Flesh (1965; 91 minutes), the first film Oshima made via his own production company. He wrote and directed the feature, basing it off a novel by Futara Yamada. The movie contains some stylistic choices that would allow Oshima to tap into the popularity of the naughty "pink" genre (essentially, softcore shots of sex and a healthy dose of skin), but at its core, Pleasures of the Flesh is a potboiler, a strange crime film with a unique central concept. Katsuo Nakamura plays Atsushi, an obsessive man in his early 20s who has been pining after Shoko (Mariko Kaga), a young girl he once tutored. He has kept his distance from her ever since her parents persuaded him to kill a blackmailer who had molested Shoko as a child. He borrowed from the philosophy of Hitchcock and committed this crime on a train. It's good advice, and the murder was a near-perfect crime, except Atsushi was spotted by a small-time official who was about to be nabbed for embezzling public funds. He blackmails Atsushi into holding onto a third of the stolen money while he serves his full jail sentence. They have no connection, so the authorities will never know where to look for that portion of the missing cash.

At first, Atsushi dutifully does as he's told, but after Shoko marries another man and it becomes clear that he will never possess her, Atsushi decides to blow all the money. He has a year before the blackmailer will be out of prison, and if he burns through the ill-gotten gains by then, he will kill himself and avoid any further consequence.

What follows is a series of paid relationships, of Atsushi hiring prostitutes and desperate women to be his live-in mistresses. Most of the women are picked for their resemblance to Shoko, who haunts his mind like a ghost. The various arrangements peter out when other circumstances get in the way. One girl is a gangster's moll, another is married and trying to earn money for her family since her husband is unemployed. The freedom this money provides, and the schism between bought love and the real love Atsushi desires, makes him cruel. He grows bored with the prizes that are easily captured.

Oshima and cinematographer Akira Takada shot Pleasures of the Flesh for widescreen, with garish, fully rendered colors and often startling, abstract compositions. Some of the storytelling is experimental, and so in terms of narrative structure, the film is a little weak. The lock-step construction of your average crime film, where events lead one to another until often the crook falls under the weight of his own guilt, is absent here, replaced by a more breathless rush from one scenario to the next. It works for the large part, though the serial relationships grow a little tiresome before the final quarter of the film finally turns into its last plot twist. Atsushi becomes entangled in ironic coincidences, bringing about punishments he planned to avoid--though not in the ways he would have expected.

Oshima shifts into black-and-white for his 1966 film, Violence at Noon (99 minutes), a choice befitting its serious tone and its themes of duality. The movie is about a love triangle between two women and one man. The man is a thug named Eisuke (Kei Sato), who is also known as the High-Noon Attacker. His nickname was earned on a crime spree. He breaks into homes at midday and rapes the housewives he finds. On the day he is reunited with Shino (Sae Kawaguchi), invading the house where she is working as a maid, he escalates and kills her employer.

Shino and Eisuke come from the same village, and at one point were part of a collective raising pigs and chickens. In with them was the woman who became his wife, the teacher Matsuko (Akiko Koyama). A flood wiped out their livestock, and desperate measures were required. Shino sold herself to a local man of means (Rokko Toura) and ultimately entered into a suicide pact with him. When her own death didn't take, Eisuke took advantage. He rescued her from oblivion, only to force himself on her--a savior who looks for payback.

Both Shino and Matsuko are caught between their love for this horrible man and the fact that they know he is horrible. Throughout Violence at Noon, they run away from him but also run toward him. The script by Takseshi Tamura, from a story by Taijun Takeda, jumps back and forth in time to show how this killer wove a sensual web around the women. Oshima and Akira Takada use inventive camera techniques to reflect the multiple points of view and the fractured sense of self the women share. Extreme close-ups, fast zooms, whip pans, chopped-up scenes using repetition and quick cuts to turn action into collage--they all contribute to a feeling that these women are linked by a reality that has come off the sprockets. Only when they agree to their common ground do Shino and Matsuko find the courage to act. Some of the material about the two women being one, as well as the aesthetic methodology, reminded me of Ingmar Bergman's Persona, which was released the same year as Violence at Noon.

Violence at Noon can be a bit slow going at times, but its cinematic acrobatics show a more rigorous control on the story than Oshima displayed in Pleasures of the Flesh. There are none of the narrative gaps, none of the leaps that made that film stutter. The conflict between common sense and desire is already developing as a major theme in these first two films: we chase our passion even when we know it's not necessarily healthy to do so.

Clearly there was some cinematic back and forth going on between Japan and Europe during the 1960s. While Persona and Violence at Noon criss-crossed in their productions and likely didn't influence one another, the Godard tag that Oshima picked up earlier in his career has some real merit. The use of Shino's written letters in Violence is not dissimilar to Godard's use of title cards in his films. The French director is also known for his playful approach to audio, and I hear echoes of his technique in Oshima's soundtracks. Dropping out all sound for absolute silence, sudden bursts of incongruous music--these are JLG trademarks. The third film in Oshima's Outlaw Sixties, Sing a Song of Sex (1967; 103 minutes) begins with no sound. The camera is silently centered on a burn mark, and as the music comes in, so does the flame. (The use of audio in the opening scenes of the next film of the set, Japanese Summer, is even more dazzling.)

Sing a Song of Sex was a largely improvised film, and this "on the street" technique and its political posturing add more to the connection with the Nouvelle Vague. As the movie follows four restless, horny students over two days, Akira Takada's camera probes the scenes, rooting out the story. In one sequence, the camera is on a swivel, swinging back and forth between the bored and the drunk at a restaurant. In many others, it walks with its characters as they pass through the city. The use of advertising as a backdrop doesn't just evoke thoughts of Godard, but also Warhol and pop art.

In terms of story, Sing a Song of Sex is about a quartet of older students who are bored and restless as they talk about sex, go out drinking with their teacher and some of their female classmates, and deal with the intrusion of real life on their self-contained world. The movie is set during the return of a controversial nationalistic holiday, and the boys pass by protests without ever considering anything beyond their libido. Much of the film is spent searching for the elusive student #469 (Kazuko Tajima), a dreamgirl that only one of them has even seen, but for whom they all indulge a shared violent rape fantasy. Oshima is putting the political up against the personal and critiquing the disconnect of youth. His characters lack a moral center, and indeed, there is even a struggle to find the moral center of the nation. On one hand, you have the protest against the return of old-fashioned values, and on the other, you have kids looking to America, standing up against Vietnam and singing folk songs from the U.S. (Songs are seen as a method of communication that carries messages through changing history.) At the same time, Oshima brings up questions about Japan's Korean origins and the country's subsequent treatment of its neighbors.

Sing a Song of Sex goes on a little too long. (I had the same problem with all the films in Eclipse Series 21, actually, including as noted above; they kept going even after my interest in the initial concepts had worn out.) The final scenes bring the boys together with three women they have objectified or victimized and they are forced to prove whether they are all talk and daydreams or if they can make their sick fantasies actually happen. The staging is abstract and pedantic, much like later Godard or the pretentious soul searching of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1968 Partner. The struggle for meaning is all too obvious and comes off as strained. Still, Sing a Song of Sex is fascinating up until that point. It practically twitches with agitated energy searching for an outlet; I'm just not convinced that Oshima found the right one for it.

[Side note: There is an interesting comparison to be made between Sing a Song of Sex and Toshiyaki Toyada's 2001 juvenile delinquent film Blue Spring and the Taiyō Matsumoto manga on which it is based. Perhaps another time.]

Whatever wall of reality Oshima shattered at the end of Sing a Song of Sex (I prefer to think he went past the fourth wall and straight on into the fifth or sixth), it stays shattered for his 1967 film Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (99 minutes) (a.k.a. Night of the Killer). This black-and-white parable takes place mostly underground, in a basement prison where a roving gang is locking up abductees they hope to indoctrinate into their wanton cause. Our gateway into this No Exit-style scenario are Nejiko (Keiko Sakurai), an 18-year-old nymphomaniac, and Otoko (Kei Sato again), an AWOL soldier with a death wish. Down in the hole with them are a weary pragmatist, a wise old man, and a crook who randomly stabs people. Also, there is a young boy (Masakazu Tamura) with a yen for killing. He doesn't care what or whom. He just wants to get his hands on a gun and start shooting.

Both the death-obsessed teen and Nejiko represent Oshima's ongoing concern with the moral bankruptcy of bored youth. The old duo "sex and death" come up time and again in Japanese Summer, though Nejiko has a hard time finding anyone who will actually sleep with her. When she finally does, it isn't satisfying and nowhere close to life affirming. When the boy makes his first kills, he also finds it underwhelming. Give the kids what they want, and they realize they don't want it anymore. Nejiko's fate is tied to Otoko's regardless, and ultimately, they will discover that sex and death are tastes that are only great when they go together.

In the bunker, the sole link to the outside world is a TV set, one that is governed over by the pragmatist, earning him the nickname Television (played by Rokko Toura). The prisoners use the TV to monitor the progress of their captors and their gang war, but also to listen to the news about an American sniper that is killing Japanese citizens for no apparent reason. Oshima makes comparisons between this man and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, as well as between the political turmoil in his version of Japan and the race riots in the U.S. His heavily coded narrative weaves in and out of these real-world analogues, and presumably, each of his characters are meant to represent some piece of society. Some of the abducted are on the side of the killer, some want him dead, and even the ones who agree with each other can't actually agree to agree.

Japanese Summer: Double Suicide is obtuse by design, and Oshima provides no magic decoder ring to sort it all out. Some of his symbols are obvious (Nejiko and Otoko, for instance, are constantly framing themselves in outlines of bodies, like the chalk figures at murder scenes), and others are lost either to an historical/political context that I personally didn't understand or possibly are red herrings that only mean something to the director and his co-writers, Mamoru Sasaki and Takeshi Tamura. From the liner notes, I am led to believe that Oshima would be pleased that I was confounded by his movie; however, I am not sure how he'd feel about me being bored by it. Interestingly enough, for as abstract as the story is, the film itself is the most straightforward in terms of visual style. Japanese Summer is the first feature in the box to be shot by someone other than Akira Takada. New cinematographer Yasuhiro Yoshioka drops most of the experimentation and seems to favor more formal frame construction. The actors are usually arranged according to a very strict placement, calling to mind the look of classic paintings or still photographs.

I was disappointed to peek at the liner notes of Three Resurrected Drunkards (1968; 80 minutes) (a.k.a. Sinner in Paradise) midway through the movie and see that a Monkees comparison was already made for me, because I was totally ready to call that out. Opening with three guys walking arm and arm on a beach while a sped-up pop tune rattles along underneath, I couldn't help but think of the PreFab Five. Seeing the seemingly random comedic events that follow, the comparison stuck. Though, let's call it out: the Monkees' full-length Head's discombobulated narrative is practically lucid by comparison.

Three Resurrected Drunkards is like an angry art school comedy. Three new graduates--O-noppo, Chu-noppo, and Chibi, a.k.a. Big, Middle, and Tiny, a.k.a. actors Kazuhiko Kato, Osamu Kitayama, and Norihiko Hashida--go for a swim, only to have a mysterious hand come up out of the sand, take half their clothes, and replace them with other clothes and cash. Left with no choice but to put on the new outfits, O-noppo and Chibi are mistaken for two illegal Korean immigrants ("stowaways"), a soldier (Kei Sato) and his companion, who ran from South Korea rather than join U.S. troops in Vietnam. The Koreans try to kill the boys to cover their tracks, but the boys escape assassination only to be deported. They also get entangled with a Korean girl (Mako Midori) who helps them, despite having her own problems.

The odds are stacked against the trio, but Oshima gives them a Bunuel-esque out. Midway through the movie, Three Resurrected Drunkards resets, taking us back to the beginning. This time, though, the guys begin to alter events. Their main change: admitting they are Korean. This is a shift that was set-up by a faux-documentary digression where the actors take to the streets to interview people and challenge them as to how they define their national identity.

On paper, Three Resurrected Drunkards is a daring experiment in gonzo filmmaking; in practice, it's dated and makes for lethargic viewing. Were this really a Monkees jam, it would be a lot more manic and silly, and while that may not have been Oshima's intention, it might have been a little more palatable than the self-satisfied seriousness that is here instead. Everything seems too dialed down, including the more dramatic second half. O-noppo's crush on the girl, for instance, is too reserved, and so his anger when he sees how horrible her guardian (Fumio Watanabe) treats her doesn't have much impact. Oshima is building to a startling conclusion, one that drives home his anti-war message and boils with the anger he feels in regard to Vietnam and the historical mistreatment of Korea, but like most of the films in Oshima's Outlaw Sixties, it takes too long to get there, and the view along the way gets tiresome.

Look, I get why Nagisa Oshima is so well respected, and I also understand why the title of Oshima's Outlaw Sixties - Eclipse Series 21 is well earned. The Japanese film director was an outlaw. An independent filmmaker who broke from the studio system when it was clear he was not going to be able to make the volatile movies he wanted to make the way he wanted to make them, Oshima is a man with a mission. He is an artist with a passion for cinema, and his cinema is about the passion of individuals. Eclipse Series 21 showcases a selection of movies that are sensuous, aesthetically audacious, and for the 1960s, politically provocative. The five films in the box attack the foundations of moviemaking and dig down to its core, casting aside the rubble willy-nilly. For me, however, the more obtuse and disconnected the narratives became, the less interested I was as an audience member. This may make me an outsider, too, it's certainly not conventional critical wisdom, but I have to imagine that Oshima would respect my stance as much as I respect his. Your views on any of this, of course, will also be you own.

Trailers for: Sing a Song of Sex
Japanese Summer: Double Suicide

For a full rundown on the special features, read the full article at DVD Talk.