I liked what Nagisa Oshima was trying to do here, which was to condemn Japanese treatment of Korean immigrants and the horrors of the Vietnam war. Unfortunately, how he went about it was too silly for me, starting with the casting of The Folk Crusaders, whose music and antics ala the early Beatles or Monkees were more grating than funny. The series of misadventures they find themselves in are light on both humor and biting political commentary. At one point one says, "It'd be nice if a couple of bodies just fell from the sky," and another replies, "Damn, if only this were Vietnam. There are corpses all over the place there." It's not exactly deep.
The long history between Japan and Korea is complicated to say the least, and I'm sure the skits and absurd tone held meaning for the counterculture in Japan at the time that I can't fully appreciate, but I didn't get the sense that there was a lot of nuance here. About halfway through, the film resets itself and we start seeing the same inane scenes all over again, identically initially, and then gradually diverging. Let's just say, it was painful both times through.
What really made me hate the film, however, was its treatment of the execution of Nguyen Van Lem, a moment caught on film that shocked the world. As that occurred on February 1, 1968 and this film was released March 30, 1968, it gives you an indication for how quickly it was slapped together, and it shows. The film opens with the trio play-acting this execution on a beach, trying to get the aiming of the gun and the facial expression of the victim just right to goofy music, which I thought was in incredibly poor taste. Imagine some other war atrocity from history being made light of in this way; it's mind-boggling. At the end of the film Oshima tries to restore a sense of gravitas by showing a mural of this image repeatedly and equates it to Japanese officials executing Korean immigrants in the process, which was heavy-handed and far too simplistic besides. Overall, just an irritating, tedious film, and I say that despite being aligned to the director's anti-war, anti-xenophobia positions.
The long history between Japan and Korea is complicated to say the least, and I'm sure the skits and absurd tone held meaning for the counterculture in Japan at the time that I can't fully appreciate, but I didn't get the sense that there was a lot of nuance here. About halfway through, the film resets itself and we start seeing the same inane scenes all over again, identically initially, and then gradually diverging. Let's just say, it was painful both times through.
What really made me hate the film, however, was its treatment of the execution of Nguyen Van Lem, a moment caught on film that shocked the world. As that occurred on February 1, 1968 and this film was released March 30, 1968, it gives you an indication for how quickly it was slapped together, and it shows. The film opens with the trio play-acting this execution on a beach, trying to get the aiming of the gun and the facial expression of the victim just right to goofy music, which I thought was in incredibly poor taste. Imagine some other war atrocity from history being made light of in this way; it's mind-boggling. At the end of the film Oshima tries to restore a sense of gravitas by showing a mural of this image repeatedly and equates it to Japanese officials executing Korean immigrants in the process, which was heavy-handed and far too simplistic besides. Overall, just an irritating, tedious film, and I say that despite being aligned to the director's anti-war, anti-xenophobia positions.