Nagisa Ôshima's third movie is about a slum in Osaka, where the young people all live by prostitution, theft, and selling their own blood. This goes on for a long time, while Kayoko Honoo's face grows shinier and shinier from sweat, and blacker from grime, because apparently there's no water, until there's a riot destroying the crooks at the top, whereupon she walks out of the slum.
This is, by Ôshima's standards, a happy ending, but it does raise the question of why she couldn't have left earlier. The answer I imagine is that Ôshima felt a need to organize the lumpenproletariat to destroy their essentially bourgeouis, vampiric masters, before she could abandon them to their own fate. What they're going to do is not clear to me. There are still no jobs. What Miss Honoo is going to do is also unclear to me. Her skill set seems to consist of whoring, selling her blood, and incitement to riot.
I suppose it's symbolic. Having cleaned up the Osaka slum, she is now going to clean up the rest of Japan and possibly the world. Film, however, is a very literal medium, and therefore I am more concerned with the rather lackadaisical manner in which people riot, particularly the big guy with the wooden pole.
None of which has anything to do with the movie's impact in 1960, when it was novel, shocking and had something to say that needed to be said. Nowadays, after more than half a century of increasing violence on the screen, it lacks snap.
