Two movies from acclaimed director Nagisa Oshima!

Naked Youth(1960)

Nagisa Oshima's groundbreaking film opens with young, attractive Mako and her friend hitching a ride from an old man. After her friend leaves, the man tries to rape her, and she is saved only by the handsome Kiyoshi. Later, against the background of the tumultuous 1960 U.S./Japan Security Treaty demonstrations, Kiyoshi and Mako walk along a grungy seaside lumberyard while talking about sex. He attempts to kiss her, she slaps him, and he throws her in the water. She cries out that she can't swim. When she continues to refuse his advances, he steps on her fingers as she clings to a log. Kiyoshi then saves Mako from a trio of seedy pimps looking to impress her into working for them, but after rescuing her, he forces himself on her again. With this unlikely beginning, Kiyoshi and Mako form a passionate though doomed romance. Soon she stops going to school and moves into his flea-ridden dive of an apartment. Utterly disillusioned with all trappings of societal convention, the two get cash by blackmailing businessmen and by shaking down Kiyoshi's middle-aged sugarmama. Tension with this Bonnie and Clyde duo builds after Mako has an abortion in a run down clinic, performed by an alcoholic doctor.

The Sun's Burial (1960)

The poorest slums of Osaka are the setting for Oshima's bleak yet stylish tale of life in the lower depths. A pitiless examination of juvenile delinquency amidst grinding poverty, its inexorable spectacle of treachery, cruelty, greed, opportunism, desperation, and madness make the The Three-Penny Opera (1931) look sentimental. Oshima's fragmentary narrative cuts jarringly between an array of pimps, extortionists, hookers, thieves, and outright lunatics, nearly all of whom want to seize control of the illegal and highly lucrative sale of blood to cosmetics companies. Young Takeshi (Isao Sasaki) most nearly approaches a protagonist in this cutthroat universe, his sole virtue being a desire to escape. The rest of the characters are so alike in their devotion to vice, and Oshima's distancing devices are so severe, that after a time they seem more like twitchy animated figures than human beings. This seems to be the director's point about the effects of defeat in WWII upon Japan, which is symbolized by many cuts to a setting sun, with a final grenade explosion pointing toward Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite the unrelenting horror on display, the film is visually spectacular, as the director splashes the garish red and orange neon signs of Osaka's commercial district across magnificent widescreen compositions.