Double Suicide: Japanese Summer

1967 [JAPANESE]

Crime / Drama

3
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Certified Fresh 62%
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Upright 62% · 50 ratings
IMDb Rating 6.7/10 10 942 942

firearm killing spree allegorical 1960s

Plot summary

A sex-obsessed woman, a suicidal man she meets on the street, and a gun-crazy wannabe gangster become trapped in an underground hideaway.

720p.WEB 1080p.WEB
905.76 MB
1280*546
Japanese 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 38 min
Seeds 2
1.64 GB
1920*818
Japanese 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 38 min
Seeds 3

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by tedg

Solid Shadows with Conflicting Death Wishes

I know a few of this man's films. They are among the richest experiences I know, but I was surprised at how deeply this one worked on me.The surprise comes in part from knowing how specific his target audience was. I am the right generation but the wrong decade and culture. I recently encountered the effect with "Naisu no mori" which took some significant shifting on my part to put me in the right place.Oshima is politically radical, violently iconoclastic and deeply critical of what he sees as a broken Japanese culture. In this film he targets sensibilities that would be hard for even Japanese viewers to understand today. I didn't even try, and simply relegated all the broken souls I saw to a generalized brokenness. Perhaps that makes the film better, because it allows us to experience the technique of the thing more directly.The story doesn't matter except that it throws an eighteen year old girl with a "screw loose" in with a suicidal AWOL soldier and a group of ragtag gangsters. Some of the action takes place in an abandoned futuristic city, but the core of the film is in a bunker of some sort. It is a terrific set and one wonders how in the world many of the shots were made. Some of them pan the space, showing walls that could not have been there at the start of the shot.It is a complex space, concrete, with sometimes deep, sometimes close walls that seem to change. The floors and ceilings have different heights. There are stone altar slabs with spring water coming from roughly hewn holes. Sometimes the walls and floors have handcarved human-shaped niches. The lighting always seems natural but the sources would be physically impossible. The space reminded me of Tarkovsky.Oshima says he hates Ozu and Kurosawa, but the cameras of both clearly is used and extended here. The poses are formal, the movements of the eye architectural. This film was unknown to me until today, and it replaces Welles' Othello as my go to example of an architectural film. The characters are less people than they are active components of the space. Every action, every perception — ours and theirs — is spatially situated. I loved it. Mind you, this is in spite of missing the social commentary; some would think it was if I were watching a mimed Shakespearean play. But I think this film is in the eye, the space.It is so extraordinary that I am giving it one of my coveted 4 ratings.Ted's Evaluation -- 4 of 3: Every cineliterate person should experience this.
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Reviewed by ricardojorgeramalho 6 / 10

Hermetic Surrealism

A strange film, frankly difficult to interpret, especially for those who are not Japanese or share Oshima's radical cinematographic vision, in which sex and violence occupy a prominent symbolic place.

There are obvious clues. A strong influence of Godard and Resnais, the most hermetic and ideological representatives of the French New Wave. Rejection of Western and American violence, symbolized in the sniper, and the influence and fascination that this culture seems to exert in Japanese society, symbolized in gangs and in the young Japanese aspiring gunfighter. A visible moral decay in the young nymphomaniac or the sacrifice of the few who still uphold a moral integrity, which the suicidal deserter seems to symbolize.

Slightly dispersed ideas in a formally attractive but totally surreal work, in an avant-garde style without a true guiding thread that allows the viewer to read it clearly and safely.

There will be those who appreciate it, but it's certainly not my favorite type of cinematographic language.

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