Both literally and metaphorically “United Red Army” is a movie that transpires between these two statements, in the chasm between fervent hope and cruel reality.In a recently published article, I purposefully defied The Bluebook. One of the last lines of dialogue, blurted by a chastened radical, has quite the opposite effect. The film’s opening image, of students trudging single file through the snow, is accompanied by an on-screen title at once mournful and proud: “Once, armed youth cried out for revolution.” Wakamatsu underscores the tragic failures of his characters without trivializing their urgent desire for change. In “United Red Army” the policemen remain invisible. “The Choice of Hercules,” a big-budget 2002 film, relates the event from the perspective of the police. Wakamatsu, who shot this sequence in his country house, which he went so far as to destroy for the wrecking-ball finale, has said he intended to refute a previous depiction of the incident.
(Much of the siege, which lasted 10 days in February 1972, was broadcast on Japanese television.) With their comrades dead or arrested, the five remaining Red Army members escape to a mountain lodge, where they hold a caretaker hostage and face off with the police. Wakamatsu restages the part of the story most familiar to Japanese audiences. In its final hour the film turns into a tense action thriller as Mr.
The Maoist practice of self-criticism takes on lunatic dimensions: members perceived as ideologically weak are shamed and beaten unconscious in the hopes they will be “reborn” with a new revolutionary awareness. For all the talk of “world revolutionary war,” their orders are motivated by power-grabbing paranoia and petty spite. In the purposefully grueling middle section of “United Red Army,” with the ragtag group holed up in a rural cabin, commanders start to behave like cult leaders. “Go, Go Second Time Virgin,” about the relationship between two teenage victims of sexual abuse, unfolds on a high-rise rooftop, an open space made to feel like a no-exit purgatory. One of his most notorious movies, “The Embryo Hunts in Secret” (1966), is a study of a sadomasochistic encounter that never leaves the sadist’s cramped apartment. Wakamatsu has long made a virtue of claustrophobia. Working with tiny budgets and minimal locations, Mr. (One sex scene involves a Hiroshima victim and a poster of Stalin.)
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In 1965 he put pinku eiga on the international map when his peeping-tom skin flick, “Secrets Behind the Wall,” was invited to the Berlin International Film Festival, much to the horror of the Japanese film establishment. Wakamatsu stood apart from many of his peers by combining rough sex with avant-garde shock tactics and some semblance of New Left politics. Wakamatsu, who has been unable to obtain a United States visa because of his political affiliations, will answer questions by video hookup from Tokyo.Ī former construction worker and gang member (who did some jail time for robbery), Mr. Wakamatsu, will introduce the screening, after which Mr. Masayuki Kakegawa, who wrote the film with Mr. The film is set to receive its United States premiere on July 6 at the Japan Society in New York (where it is being presented by the New York Asian Film Festival and the Japan Cuts festival).
Wakamatsu and his regular screenwriter in the 1960s, Masao Adachi, were active members of the radical left. An intensively researched docudrama, teeming with dates, names and events, it is also a personal reckoning with a familiar narrative of idealism and disappointment: Mr. (He has about 100 movies to his credit and was also an executive producer of “In the Realm of the Senses,” the 1976 succès de scandale directed by his friend Nagisa Oshima.) At 72, having outgrown the smut-minded confines of the pink film, he has made his most ambitious work, “United Red Army,” a 190-minute chronicle of the tumultuous rise and self-destructive collapse of the Japanese militant student groups of the 1960s and ’70s. Wakamatsu kept up a furious rate of production for much of his career. Among the most talented and eccentric was Koji Wakamatsu, a gonzo auteur with a knack for eyebrow-raising titles (“Go, Go Second Time Virgin,” “Violated Women in White”) whose most interesting films owe as much to Karl Marx as to the Marquis de Sade. Most pink-film directors were anonymous journeymen, but the industry nurtured its share of eccentric talents. AT its peak in the 1960s the brand of kinky soft-core erotica known as pinku eiga, or pink film, accounted for half of all movie production in Japan.
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