Assigned to make a topical youth film, Oshima produced an intense, theatrically inflected study of Osaka criminal gangs that, like the films of Pasolini, finds both dignity and cruelty in the violent world of the criminal proletariat. Oshima uses a fragmentary narrative structure to interweave multiple stories of petty criminality and prostitution into a brutal typology of the underworld emerging in Japan's war-scarred slums. The Sun's Burial is tempered by the unusual beauty of its mise-en-scene and the choreographed long takes that follow the rhythmic rise and fall of the symbolically overripe sun that casts an unnatural glow over the film.