The Sun's Burial

A film set in a slum district of Osaka. The place is wrecked. Shacks, mud, an open channel and fire. Nobody here officially exists. No work, no papers, and the police barely come in. One trade runs: blood. People sell blood. Middlemen collect it, hand it to hospitals, and the margin between is large. Hanako is inside that trade. A young woman; she runs the collection points and works with two gangs at once. From there the film is a story about gangs. Two groups cannot divide the district. Shin and Yosehei lead them. Both young, both ruthless. Hanako sells information to both sides. There is a trade in identity as well. The papers of the dead are collected and sold, and a name is worth a sum. There is an old man. He carries a dream from before the war and keeps telling the young about the old days; nobody listens. What the narrative is interested in is not crime but ground: its idea is that in a district left outside the postwar growth the last thing people have to sell is their bodies. The violence is sudden and not aestheticised. Ōshima does not idealise the young. The narrative gives them as neither victims nor heroes. The colour is harsh. The sky is red, the earth brown, and the place is always burning. This is one of the director's early films and, with the others he made that year, took him into conflict with the studio. It was shot in real locations. Masahiko Tsugawa, Kayoko Honoo, Isao Sasaki and Junzaburo Ban are in the cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes the Japanese new wave and hard social films. Who it is not for: anyone looking for a sympathetic character; nobody in the narrative is good and hope is offered nowhere.