“Essential Oshima” (Donald Richie). “Certainly the oddest Oshima film yet to surface in this country,” was how Vincent Canby, an Oshima champion, characterized Dear Summer Sister when it got its first New York release in 1985, and the film remains quite amazingly strange. The director takes a very serious subject – the return of Okinawa to Japan from American control – and gives it a pop, almost parodic feel, with a floating camera and free-form narrative. Sunaoko, a teenaged girl, travels from Tokyo to Okinawa to look for a boy who may be her half-brother. Oshima sends her on a Godardian travelogue; in an orange polka dot mini-dress, she tours the island with a friend and an elderly, beer-swilling “gentleman” in a white suit. “We’re not ordinary tourists,” Sunaoko declares as they visit war memorials, beaches, and burial sites to learn about Okinawa’s recent history, culture, and funeral rites. Though he claimed at the time that the film was very clear and straightforward, Oshima keeps adding all manner of strange characters and incidents, hints of incest and illegitimacy, a murder plot, and commentary on Japan’s war crimes and abuse of Okinawa, all the while maintaining a breezy, sometimes farcical tone. The effect is sometimes enchanting, sometimes baffling. “Dear Summer Sister has something of the manner of a frisky Japanese homage to Michelangelo Antonioni . . . . The performances are good, especially those of Hiromi Kurita as Sunaoko and an actress simply called Lily as Momoko. The photography – this time by Yasuhiro Yoshioka – is exceptionally bright and vivid, as it always is in Oshima’s work” (Vincent Canby, The New York Times).