Japanese Summer: Double Suicide (1967) is one of the films in the Criterion Eclipse Series 21: Oshima's Outlaw Sixties series. It is a visually impressive film with great framing shots and something of an allegorical film, although I'm still trying to work out exactly how. There seems to be some obsession with the Japanese "death drive," but the lone female played by Keiko Sakurai is obsessed with sex and she cannot find fulfillment with the suicidal AWOL soldier played by Kei Sato. Several of the other characters of the gang that are looking for violence seem to represent certain aspect of the society-the aging yakuza with eh gun, the gun crazy 17 year old, Television, the bandit, the "oni." Then there's the troubling Caucasian foreigner who is randomly killing people which is referred to being like the assassination in Dallas by the commenter on the TV. It is a curious film-one that I'm not sure I fully understand. At some point I might have to give it a second viewing, but there's a stack of movies waiting in the meantime.
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Don't you think the Japanese movie business is a bit limited in terms of themes? They seem to have made a lot of movies about yakusa, samurai, and monsters / horror. Perhaps these are the ones that become most famous. Whilst these themes are generally metaphors for something deeper (at least in the high brow stuff you watch), there's surely plenty of variety in Japanese culture from which to choose other metaphors.
Posted by: Edward | July 21, 2011 at 10:02 AM
I think you get a wider variety of themes in contemporary films. Japanese like other countries have a number of genres which they like to continually go back to and reinterpret or use to get a particular idea across. It seems that Kiyoshi Kurosawa in particular is known for his fresh metaphors int he films he has made in the 1990s and 2000s.
Posted by: MC | July 21, 2011 at 12:24 PM