Japanese Summer: Double Suicide

Keiko Sakurai in Japanese Summer: Double Suicide

Nagisa Oshima's Japanese Summer: Double Suicide is a protopunk protest film with surrealistic touches. This 1967 feature is my favorite Oshima film of the 60s, but I have to cop to being lukewarm to the director. Oshima's narratives always seem haphazard and arbitrary to me. It is as if he is more interested in broadcasting his themes into the viewer's cranium than constructing plausible or even comprehensible plotlines. 

...Double Suicide is fairly incoherent even for Oshima. A deserter named Otoko, who is fixated on suicide, crosses paths with a nymphomaniac named Nejiko and, yes, that description pretty much sums up her character (shades of Fuller's Shock Corridor). That Otoko and Nejiko meet on an elevated urban highway makes little sense in terms of logic, but allows the director leeway to offer dream-like vignettes satirizing his country's militant nationalism. For Oshima is not interested in his characters per se, but in shedding light on the malaise of Japanese society.

Otoko is an introvert seeking self-annihilation, he is kin to Camus' Meursault. Kei Sato gives an appropriately self-effacing performance as Otoko. He would have been a better Meursault than the overly charismatic Mastroianni in Visconti's L'Etranger, released that same year. As Nejiko, Keiko Sakura is fine as long as she is in motion, frugging and schtupping her way across the widescreen. She boasts about her forty inch bust and it is on ample display. Unfortunately, when Nejiko is stationary and has to recite her lines, her limitations become immediately apparent. She only appeared in four feature films. 

Nejiko and Otoko happen upon a group of gangsters digging up a cache of guns. The gangsters are anticipating a fracas with some rivals. For some dubious reason, they hold Nejiko and Otoko hostage in the proverbial abandoned warehouse. A teenager, obsessed with shooting a rifle, begs to join the gang. So, for the main part of the film, we are stuck in a room with nine men carrying varying amounts of anger and one exceedingly randy moll. 

The various men offer monologues chiefly concerned with violent death. Oshima's timing and spacing of these sequences are expert, the corroded setting mirrors the sense of spiritual decay. For this is Oshima's theme: the death wish of the Japanese male. The gangsters follow the news on television about a shooting spree perpetuated by a visiting American. His sniping at the populace ruffles the gangsters and they soon begin knocking each other off. The few that are left join the American, who looks like a Beach Boy, and they all die in a hail of bullets.

My rational side cannot fully endorse ...Double Suicide, but I cannot deny its unconscious power. As in Godard's concurrent Weekend, in which capitalistic culture is also seemingly on the verge of collapse, there is a feeling that a violent revolution is a convulsive spasm away. Now Godard and Oshima proved to be poor fortune tellers, but they captured the revolutionary fervor of the era. The corridors and rooms in ...Double Suicide are places where both gangsters and revolutionary cells can plot stratagems. The film suffers from a reliance on the mod effects of the eras, I could have done without Oshima's whip pans. However, my intimation of Sam Fuller earlier was not accidental. ...Double Suicide shares the pulpy, B movie punch of Shock Corridor and The Naked Kiss.