Essentially the film relates the story of the famous Japanese anarchist Sakae Osugi, who was killed by the authorities soon after the Tokyo earthquake of 1923, aged 38. It tells his story through his three women; his wife, Yasuko, his current lover, Noe Ito, who was killed with him, and Itsuko, who tries unsuccessfully to kill him in 1916. His story is inter-cut with that of two students in modern day Tokyo, who discuss the merits or otherwise of free love and Osugi’s life and times.
And that’s not even scratching the surface! Critics have often compared the film to Rivette and Godard, and there is a Godardian ambivalence towards conventionality in not only the film’s narrative structure, but in the depiction of the students, who cannot help but recall Pierrot le Fou. To this reviewer there was also a hint of Andy Warhol about it. It’s not so much in terms of any sort of minimalism, but in the way Yoshida experiments with the size and shape of not the frame, per se, but the eye-line. He doesn’t go as far as Warhol did in The Chelsea Girls, stopping short of running two frames side by side with conversations inaudibly overlapping, but he makes a point to separate his characters, in some way or another, from another part of the frame, thereby isolating them, either in the perspective of a receding passageway or split by the positioning of an inanimate object deliberately on the screen – a wall, a banister rail, a column.
