Sing a Song of Sex (1967) - Nagisa Oshima 

Well I've complained for years that next to no Oshima films (certainly no early ones) are available on DVD here. Thank heavens at least someone somewhere in the world is releasing his challenging, varied, and always fascinating early films. This particular film was a Region 3 release courtesy of Platinum Classics. I found in my little bit of research this is definitely one of the most rarely written about or discussed films in Oshima's catalog. In fact I never heard of it until I saw the DVD, and the entry on allmovie.com has not a single word written about it. Part of that could be explained by its obscurity, but this might not seem to many to be a major work from Oshima. It draws us back to his student roots shown in Night and Fog in Japan, but here the students don't have a political agenda. They don't seem to have much of an agenda at all. The four young men of the story are all rather horny, but don't seem to do a great deal about it. There doesn't seem to be a great concern for their education, the life after school, and for most we are led to believe they have lived something of a life of privilege. Unlike some of the females in the picture, these men have no care for anything political. They half heartedly mock a petition to end the war in Vietnam, and they jump in front of protesting marchers without much concern. 

The plot of the story seems irrelevant. A young and handsome professor who is worshiped by the women and respected by the men winds up the victim of an accidental death. A death that one of the boys could have prevented. His guilt is used more as a way of impressing the girls around him than as a legitimate feeling. The professor represented something of a competition for the boys. He seemed to have no problem pulling these ladies in, while all the students seemed to be eagerly awaiting any kind of sexual activity. Not to say these boys are constantly masturbating and flashing young children in public parks, they're just about as "randy" as any American school boys would be. They seem to inevitably get cold feet around women which makes their progress slow. Only one of them (the one who didn't save the professor) actually has a sexual experience in the picture, and remains the unofficial leader of the group. Along the way a multilingual folk group provides a chorus of good will and folk tunes, but a strange confrontation makes everyone uncomfortable. 

I'm not sure what Oshima was going for with this picture. His directorial style was almost anti-auteur. He adapted a different approach for every picture he made. This film in its mise-en-scene is a little more conventional than we might be used to and doesn't contain as many radical experiments as his other films of the period, perhaps another reason it gets so frequently left out of discussions. It is worth seeing as all his films of the period are worth seeing and if you can find it by all means check it out. The film is more meditative on jealousy, sex, and the power of our own fantasies and the problems they pose when enacted. All to the tune of a classic Japanese drinking song.

*Sing a Song of Sex is available on a Region 3 DVD.