Director: Nagisa Oshima
Script: Nagisa Oshima
Cinematographer: Yoshio Miyajima
Art Director: Jusho Toda
Music: Toru Takemitsu
Cast: Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Tatsukga Fugi, Takahiro Tamura, Takuzo Kawatni, Akiko Koyoma, Taiji Tonoyoma, Sumie Sasaki
Production: Mark Burton, Sunil Doshi, Jit Joshi, Anatole Dauman
Distribution:
Tamasa Distribution
122 rue de la Boétie
75008 Paris
France
Tel: 0033 1.43.59.01.01
Fax: 0033 1.43.59.64.41
Mail: [email protected]
www.tamasadiffusion.com
Year: 1978
35 mm, Colour, 108 min,
OV Japanese with French Subtitles
Best Director - Cannes Film Festival 1978
We are in 1895, under the Meji dynasty, in a village close to Tokyo. Gisaburo is an old rickshaw driver, worn out by work. Every night, Seki, his still young looking wife, welcomes him, bathes him, massages him and gives him sake to make him forget his tiredness and poverty. Exhausted, Gisaburo has no more strength to be intimate with his wife who submits but remains unsatisfied. Having completed his military service, Young Toyoji has come back to the village. After an insistent courtship, they become lovers. They share passion. Gisaburo has to disappear. They strangle him when he is drunk, and throw his body in a disused well in the forest. Under the villagers’ pressure, the lovers cannot openly live their passion. The ghost of Gisaburo appears to them. Rumours start spreading...
It is a tragic news in brief of passion, a story of ‘love and blood’ which inspired Nagisa Oshima for this film, quite different from his previous one In the Realm of Senses.
