Thursday | December 18, 2008 9:00 pm

Japanese Summer: Double Suicide
(Muri-Shinju: Nihon No Natsu)

Screening on Film

Directed by Nagisa Oshima.
With Keiko Sakuai, Kei Sato, Rokko Toura.
Japan, 1967, 35mm, black & white, 98 min.
Japanese with English subtitles.
Print source: Janus Films

Among Oshima's least known films, Japanese Summer: Double Suicide is a darkly comic romance about a couple on the run: a sex-crazed young woman and her suicidal boyfriend who are drawn into a band of violent gangsters. Declared by Oshima to personify the "death drive" in Japanese culture, the irrationally violent and unsympathetic gangsters in Japanese Summer: Double Suicide suggest a more pessimistic and absurd dimension of the outlaw anti-heroes so central to Oshima's films.