TORONTO PREMIERE! NEW 35MM PRINT!

“One of Oshima’s ten best films. . . a landmark. Profoundly tragic and examines most of Oshima’s obsessions” (Max Tessier). Never before shown in Toronto, this extremely rare Oshima puts his twist on a traditional Japanese tale – that of the double suicide, basis of, most famously, the classic film of that title  by Masahiro Shinoda. Set in the criminal underworld in a setting even more stylized than that of The Sun’s Burial, Japanese Summer: Double Suicide “centres on the ‘death-impulse’ in Japanese society” (Tony Rayns) through the blazing tale of a trio of the director’s most neurotic outsiders: Meijiko, an androgynous man who wears his hair long on one side, short on the other, white in front, black in the back; Otoko, a paranoid gangster known as the “gun-toting devil,” who hopes to find someone to kill him; and Nejiko, a woman looking for someone to make love to her. (She’s been called a nymphomaniac, but Oshima sees her more complexly than that.)  Their elaborate game of hide-and-seek in a world of what the director calls “television, toys, and demons,” pushes so far into the fantastic and anarchic that the film feels like it could slip the bonds of its sprockets altogether. (Oshima took pride in Mishima’s saying he did not understand the film.) In an essay on Double Suicide, Oshima firmly rejected the common reading of the characters as, respectively, death and life force: “Insofar as Otoko’s desire for life is convoluted, it is intensely beautiful – more so than Nejiko’s straightforward desire to live.”