This gets our vote as the most overlooked of Oshima’s films, underrated perhaps because its English title makes it appear frivolous. It’s decidedly not. Despite flights of comedy, (unnerving) sexual fantasy, youthful yearning, karaoke and hootenannies, Sing a Song of Sex offers an intent, penetrating portrait of a generation confronting its new freedoms and its inability to act on them. Oshima obviously considered the film very important, one infers from the essays he wrote about it. In some ways, Sing a Song resembles Godard’s La Chinoise (notice the pop visual compositions, with looming movie posters and Coca-Cola billboards). A group of provincial students arrives in Tokyo to take university entrance exams. Disillusioned and nihilistic, they spend their time singing dirty songs and fantasizing about strangling a rich girl. Set on a politically charged day – the Founder’s Day holiday, reinstated in 1967 after the American Occupation had banned it – amid gently falling snow, this tender, crushingly sad examination of the alienation of Japanese youth suggests that solidarity is illusionary, and that political action will always be trumped or undone by sexual desire. The portrait of Otake, the students’ mentor who teaches them the sex songs of the title, which he says express the despair of the oppressed, is movingly ambiguous. The film’s final sequences are among Oshima’s most disturbing.