MANJI  1964
(卍, Manji))
Directed by Yasuzo Masumura
91 minutes
In Japanese with English subtitles

Here is a wild flick by a Japanese director who is one of my favorites, but who is rarely screened here in the West - Yasuzo Masumura (Blind Beast). Wow, I really love this film, it's such a strange and heady mix, it canmake you absolutely intoxicate you with it's unusual exoticism. Based on a novel by Junichiro Tanizaki, it tells the story of four people whose lives intersect and then explode, with sexual tension being the mainspring. The principle character is the bored housewife of a rich lawyer, who falls in love with a girl she meets in art class and becomes her lover. In the male-dominated Japan of the early 60s, nothing could be more shocking than to see women fighting for their own desires, in control of their own destinies, and exploring a kind of love that doesn't include men!

This flick features a fantastic cast including Ayako Wakao and the always enchanting Kyôko Kishida (Woman in the Dunes). Director Masumura made 58 films during his life and had a huge influence on so many directors that came after, like Nagisa Oshima, Shohei Imamura and Takashi Miike. As one critic notes, he is "responsible for some of the most savagely beautiful, erotically-charged images ever committed to celluloid." The script is written by Kaneto Shindo, who later became the director of several classics that I have screened over the years such as Onibaba, The Naked Island and Kuroneko. The title 'manji' is the name for the Buddhist (inverted) swastika which stands for 'spiritual radiance.' But manji isn't a simple form of love, it's a double-edged force that contains both liberation and enslavement... it is about the interplay of opposites.

Manji is a delirious tale of amour fou, lesbian love, lust, jealousy and deceit.