The Man Who Stole the Sun

Kazuhiko Hasegawa's 1979 film follows a high school science teacher who is the butt of his students' jokes. Makoto Kido steals plutonium from the Tokai nuclear plant, refines it in his one-room Tokyo apartment and builds an atomic bomb. Then he holds the state hostage, except that he has no idea what to ask for; his demands grow steadily more absurd, and that vacancy becomes the film's real subject. The story idea came from Leonard Schrader. Hasegawa was born in Hiroshima and was exposed to the bomb's radiation in his mother's womb, and the film's anger comes out of that. The sequences at the Diet building, around the Imperial Palace and in Shibuya were shot guerrilla-style without permission. Hasegawa directed only two features; this was the second and last. Who it's for: viewers seeking the wildest, angriest strain of late-seventies Japanese cinema. Who it's not for: anyone wanting a measured tone or a thriller that behaves logically; the film goes off the rails on purpose.