Sing A Song of Sex

Nagisa Oshima’s 1967 film Sing A Song of Sex (A Treatise on Japanese Bawdy Songs) is a curious film.  It is basically about four rural male students who got o Tokyo to take examinations to get into university. During this process the popular teacher Otake, who has taught them a bawdy song and explained how it represents class conflicts, is accidentally killed. The students stay on to go to a Vietnam War protest and hootenanny in order to tell a rich female student that they have been fantasizing about raping her. It is a curious finale as it becomes difficult to distinguish what is fantasy and what has happened in reality. It has been suggested that the film is chronicling a new generation confronting new freedoms and their inability to act on them. Also it shows how political action will always be trumped by sexual desire. It is a curious and strangely compelling film from one of the modern masters of Japanese film. Update: this film was in included in Criterion's Eclipse Series 21: Oshima's Outlaw Sixties