Rating: 5/5
I know Oshima is well known, to those who know more about him than just that he's the dude who made that movie with Japanese penis and mutilations, etc, as someone who seems to hate every filmmaker other than himself but his 1968 film seems almost like an ode to Godard, Buñuel and to a lesser extent Resnais; 3 students are on the beach and decide to go for a swim, they strip themselves to their undies and head for the water, leaving their threads behind, when a hand reaches up from underneath the sand to steal their, I'm presuming, Japanese military outfits, leaving two of the three of them with a few yen and the clothes of *GASP* Koreans. Like with Death by Hanging, I don't know which came first as they were both released in '68, Oshima takes a look at the Japanese prejudice against Koreans and the impact this has on Koreans living in Japan; this leads the three main characters on one fantastically witty journey, only to kill them off at the 40 minute mark (in an 80 minute film); they're, you guessed, resurrected & they go through, basically, the same routine as in the first 40 minutes of the film, with some changes to the story on account of this time they know what's going to happen to them which only adds to the comedy revolving around the reactions to those who are not in the know.
There's also a moment in the film where the three main characters, played by some sort of Japanese pop band from the time, are walking the streets of, I'm assuming, Tokyo asking random people if they're Japanese, and they come to find that everyone they ask is Korean, when asked why they're Korean they simply reply, all of them, "because I am".
And guess who shows up to declare his Korean......ness? The man himself:
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