I'm not sure what I can say about United Red Army. It's part documentary, part bio-pic, and part an insufferable look into the abuse of the term "self-critique" and the silliness of a dogma that loses sight of the purpose of Revolution.
Wakamatsu is a Master, and at the ripe age of seventy-two, he's shining light on a Japanese consumer culture that's lost in malaise, and in that malaise, is left with nothing to fight for. And the light shines on America directors, where pasts Masters such as Martin Scorcese grow stale with age and output shit like Gangs of New York and Shutter Island.
Thank God for Japanese directors. Thank God for aged wisdom in film. And thank God for Wakamatsu. Enjoy this modern-day epic, but don't forget to self-critique yourself afterwards. We're watching...
From Dennis Lim at the New York Times:
At its peak in the 1960s the brand of kinky soft-core erotica known as pinku eiga, or pink film, accounted for half of all movie production in Japan. Most pink-film directors were anonymous journeymen, but the industry nurtured its share of eccentric talents. Among the most talented and eccentric was Koji Wakamatsu, a gonzo auteur with a knack for eyebrow-raising titles (“Go, Go Second Time Virgin,” “Violated Women in White”) whose most interesting films owe as much to Karl Marx as to the Marquis de Sade.
Like many exploitation filmmakers Mr. Wakamatsu kept up a furious rate of production for much of his career. (He has about 100 movies to his credit and was also an executive producer of “In the Realm of the Senses,” the 1976 succès de scandale directed by his friend Nagisa Oshima.) At 72, having outgrown the smut-minded confines of the pink film, he has made his most ambitious work, “United Red Army,” a 190-minute chronicle of the tumultuous rise and self-destructive collapse of the Japanese militant student groups of the 1960s and ’70s. An intensively researched docudrama, teeming with dates, names and events, it is also a personal reckoning with a familiar narrative of idealism and disappointment: Mr. Wakamatsu and his regular screenwriter in the 1960s, Masao Adachi, were active members of the radical left.
The film is set to receive its United States premiere on July 6 at the Japan Society in New York (where it is being presented by the New York Asian Film Festival and the Japan Cuts festival). Masayuki Kakegawa, who wrote the film with Mr. Wakamatsu, will introduce the screening, after which Mr. Wakamatsu, who has been unable to obtain a United States visa because of his political affiliations, will answer questions by video hookup from Tokyo.
A former construction worker and gang member (who did some jail time for robbery), Mr. Wakamatsu stood apart from many of his peers by combining rough sex with avant-garde shock tactics and some semblance of New Left politics. In 1965 he put pinku eiga on the international map when his peeping-tom skin flick, “Secrets Behind the Wall,” was invited to the Berlin International Film Festival, much to the horror of the Japanese film establishment. (One sex scene involves a Hiroshima victim and a poster of Stalin.)
Mr. Wakamatsu was back at Berlin this year for a mini-retrospective in the festival’s Forum sidebar, where “United Red Army” screened alongside “Go, Go Second Time Virgin” (1969) and “Ecstasy of the Angels” (1972), an account of a radical cell’s implosion with an abundance of agitprop pillow talk, and an obvious predecessor of the latest film.
Like Philippe Garrel’s “Regular Lovers” (2005), another epically sad post-’68 portrait, “United Red Army” opens on a note of exhilaration before lingering on the painful hangover after the thwarted revolutionary moment. Much of the first hour is devoted to a breathless summary of the decade’s radicalizing events, beginning with the 1960 signing of the United States-Japan Mutual Security Treaty (the target of widespread opposition and the subject of Mr. Oshima’s “Night and Fog in Japan”).
The Vietnam War was a catalyst, as it was with all student movements of the period, and the American military presence in Japan fueled the fire. By 1968 violent clashes between protesters and riot police were commonplace. Striking students shut down Tokyo University. A demonstration escalated into bloody chaos at Shinjuku Station.
The events are recounted primarily through a vivid collage of archival news footage, set to a rousing rock score by Jim O’Rourke. Drama gradually takes over from documentary as Mr. Wakamatsu introduces his characters, outlining the internal schisms and external forces that caused the student groups to unravel and splinter into extremist factions. After this whirlwind history lesson, which culminates with the merger of two depleted ultra-left brigades into the United Red Army, the film becomes a harrowing chamber piece.
Working with tiny budgets and minimal locations, Mr. Wakamatsu has long made a virtue of claustrophobia. One of his most notorious movies, “The Embryo Hunts in Secret” (1966), is a study of a sadomasochistic encounter that never leaves the sadist’s cramped apartment. “Go, Go Second Time Virgin,” about the relationship between two teenage victims of sexual abuse, unfolds on a high-rise rooftop, an open space made to feel like a no-exit purgatory.
In the purposefully grueling middle section of “United Red Army,” with the ragtag group holed up in a rural cabin, commanders start to behave like cult leaders. For all the talk of “world revolutionary war,” their orders are motivated by power-grabbing paranoia and petty spite. The Maoist practice of self-criticism takes on lunatic dimensions: members perceived as ideologically weak are shamed and beaten unconscious in the hopes they will be “reborn” with a new revolutionary awareness.
In its final hour the film turns into a tense action thriller as Mr. Wakamatsu restages the part of the story most familiar to Japanese audiences. With their comrades dead or arrested, the five remaining Red Army members escape to a mountain lodge, where they hold a caretaker hostage and face off with the police. (Much of the siege, which lasted 10 days in February 1972, was broadcast on Japanese television.)
Mr. Wakamatsu, who shot this sequence in his country house, which he went so far as to destroy for the wrecking-ball finale, has said he intended to refute a previous depiction of the incident. “The Choice of Hercules,” a big-budget 2002 film, relates the event from the perspective of the police. In “United Red Army” the policemen remain invisible.
Mr. Wakamatsu underscores the tragic failures of his characters without trivializing their urgent desire for change. The film’s opening image, of students trudging single file through the snow, is accompanied by an on-screen title at once mournful and proud: “Once, armed youth cried out for revolution.”
One of the last lines of dialogue, blurted by a chastened radical, has quite the opposite effect. “We had no courage,” he sobs. Both literally and metaphorically “United Red Army” is a movie that transpires between these two statements, in the chasm between fervent hope and cruel reality.
Technical Information:
Title: 実録・連合赤軍 あさま山荘への道程/United Red Army
Year: 2007
Country: Japan
Director: Koji Wakamatsu
Source: DVD9 Retail
DVD Format: NTSC
Container: .iso + mds
Size: 7.58 GB
Length: 3:10:02
Programs used: SubMagic, DVD Decrypter, Subtitle Creator, Muxman, VobBlanker, IFOEdit, DVD SubEdit, DVDshrink, ImgBurn
Resolution: 720x480
Aspect Ratio: 16:9
Video: MPEG2 @ ~5200 kb/s
Frame Rate: 29.97 fps
Audio: Japanese- Dolby AC3 Stereo @ 192 kb/s
Subtitles: English (custom)
Menu: Yes
Video: Untouched
DVD Extras: Trailer
Special thanks to Derbalmer and Tadanobu at KG and evildee at ADC for the custom subs and to evildee for the original upload!
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