Among Oshima's most ambitious films, The Ceremony is a soaring, psychoanalytically inspired epic that parallels the cruel spiraling story of a rigidly patriarchic family with the rise and fall of militaristic Japan. The Ceremony focuses on the tortured scion of a merchant clan and his struggles to break free from the crushing ritualistic cruelties of family and tradition that are his birthright and bitter fate. Oshima's brilliant melodrama is structured around a series of devastatingly absurd set pieces – a wedding without a bride, a phantom baseball game  – that savagely critique the psycho-sexually corrosive abuses of power at the heart of the modern Japanese family and nation.