The Ceremony

Nagisa Oshima, Japanese cinema's enfant terrible, introduces us to a dangerously nuclear family of alleged war criminals, communists, sex offenders and radical right-wingers, plus a former baseball pitcher and a katana-wielding cop thrown in apparently just for the sheer hell of it. Together, they comprise a mutual aberration society that milks dry the psychic stress and anguish of weddings and funerals. Is their shock-horror behavior offer convincing criticism of postwar Japanese society? Oshima leans into exploitation to score his points, but the net result sometimes smacks of "Mondo Cane" shockumentaries.

Thankfully, there are built-in safety valves when incest, loathing and degradation turn from dark to jet black. That's when some characters break out in honest laughter over their extended family's antics. In any case, it's a fine and foreboding warmup for Oshima's legendary topper, "In the Realm of the Senses."

I know a lot of people love this movie. For me it was not entirely successful. This is not one ceremony but many seen without any connection.

I saw a lot of events but I did not really feel I got to know any of the characters better and their motivation for their behavior. In fact I felt I knew as little about them when the movie ended as when it started.

I am not the big flashback fan for a starter. But some of the baseball things were contradicted from others as never happened. Well I have no idea now really if it did or was just made up. but again how much was then made up? What did really happen and what did not. For me not a great premise for a movie. This could as well have been all a dream.

Maybe I missed something because of the subtitles maybe not were adequate, but I doubt they could have missed that much. It did not help that I did not feel connected to any of the characters. At the same time I think their actions did not feel connected to other episodes in the paper thin story line.

I think I have seen many better and more subtle Japanese movies that were critical to society. This is not one for my collection

This film can be hard to watch for some. The family is very dysfunctional and the head of the family will make some people cringe.

As an American born in the 1980s, I do not know what the world was like after World War II. I especially don't know what the world was like for foreign countries after World War II especially those on the opposite side of America. A movie like this, although fiction, can give a sense of the struggles a nation might face, changing after World War II.

I thought the acting was well done. I'll admit I don't recognize any of the actors from other movies and I watched the movie with subtitles, but I could not stop watching this movie until the end.

A boy experiences traumas during WWII (which we don't see), and the subsequent 25 years of his life are a continuation of those traumas. Oshima skillfully depicts Japan's post-war evolution, and the ways the dark secrets of the past live on within the present. Gishiki is by no means an enjoyable film: the main character experiences nothing but losses, misfortunes, and humiliations. But this is a dark truth of life: anyone who lives long enough accumulates losses and failures, and for some, perhaps everything else is overtaken. In the end, the main character is left alone with nothing except his lost dreams and his endlessly repeating traumas. A very sad film, but one I'm glad to have seen.

(1971) The Ceremony/ Gishiki (In Japanese with English subtitles) PSYCHOLOGICAL DRAMA

Co-written and directed by Nagisa Ôshima that has Sakurada Masuo (Kenzô Kawarasaki) and Sakurada Ritsuko (Atsuko Kaku) receiving a telegram from Tachibana Terumichi (Atsuo Nakamura). And while waiting for their boat liner, Masuo and through his narration it is during then we get to witness what his life is like from the times of 1945 and 1947 when he was just a child viewers then get to see how he meets them as well as other people from within this particular clan to which some may describe as dysfunctional.

The movie is long talky and boring to pessimistic from the stand point of a fictional and exaggerate story line.