I began my evening with the next to last Oshima film in the box set: JAPANESE SUMMER: DOUBLE SUICIDE.
It was a tiresome, irritating allegory about unsettled, rebellious Japanese youth of 1967 seemingly doing the same thing many American youths at the time were doing: rebelling against the establishment on college campuses and in the streets. It was like a hackneyed off-Broadway play with character-types instead of real characters (brute, sage, strong silent type, impetuous youth, conniver, and one promiscuous female who spends the entire movie begging every one of these men to sleep with her) and mostly taking place in a single setting.
