Introduction and post-screening discussion led by Mark Anderson, Assistant Professor, Asian Languages and Literatures, University of Minnesota
This dispassionate tale finds a pair of middle-class Tokyo teenagers tangled up in a racket to extort money from older men who try to pick up young girls. Their aimlessness and narcissism prove an indictment of young people losing sight of collective activism, as Oshima uses old newsreel footage to compare the self-indulgences of the teens to the disillusion of slightly older student activists. This was Oshima’s first major box-office hit in Japan. 1960, new 35mm print, 96 minutes.
