Mandala

Akio Jissoji's 1971 Japanese film begins with two student couples swapping partners and spending the night at a motel. The night is broken by an assault, and the young people, looking for answers, reach a community that preaches sexual freedom. Rather than building a plot, the film argues Buddhist thought through images. The framings are deliberately unbalanced, the angles extreme, and the editing gives no orderly flow of time. The telling is itself part of the experiment. It is the second film in Jissoji's ATG-produced trilogy; the first is This Transient Life, the last is Poem. All three are counted among the most formally driven works of the Japanese new wave of the period. Who it's for: those who like Japanese experimental cinema and post-sixties avant-garde. Who it's not for: viewers troubled by sexual violence and scenes of coercion inside a cult; the film shows both openly.