Sing a Song of Sex

NEW 35mm PRINT!  │  “This gets our vote as the most overlooked of Oshima’s films, underrated perhaps because its English title makes it appear frivolous. It’s decidedly not. Despite flights of comedy, (unnerving) sexual fantasy, youthful yearning, karaoke and hootenannies, Sing a Song of Sex offers an intent, penetrating portrait of a generation confronting its new freedoms and its inability to act on them ... A group of provincial students arrives in Tokyo to take university entrance exams. Disillusioned and nihilistic, they spend their time singing dirty songs and fantasizing about strangling a rich girl. Set on a politically charged day — the Founder’s Day holiday, reinstated in 1967 after the American Occupation had banned it — amid gently falling snow, this tender, crushingly sad examination of the alienation of Japanese youth suggests that solidarity is illusionary, and that political action will always be trumped or undone by sexual desire ... The film’s final sequences are among Oshima’s most disturbing” (Cinematheque Ontario). “A film of extreme juxtapositions of a dreamlike nature ... Not really a comedy but an extended fantasy that has many highly comedic moments” (Maureen Turim). Popular singer Ichiro Araki has a lead role. Colour, 35mm, in Japanese with English subtitles. 103 mins.