KÔSHIKEI / DEATH BY HANGING (1968)

Provocateur, third-rail enthusiast, chameleon, Japanese director Nagisa Ôshima only connected a couple of times with American audiences (IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES/’76; MERRY CHRISTMAS MR. LAWRENCE/’83), but this earlier work might have left a mark if not for that off-putting title.  The ‘hanging’ comes early and doesn’t go as planned since the executed man, a Korean immigrant who killed and then raped two girls (Oshima not interested in making things easy), has so disassociated from himself that he can’t die.  He’s not only innocent (maybe), he’s not him!  Whatever are prison officials & military officers to do?  Reenacting the crime to jog the condemned man’s memory, these middle-aged men look ridiculous, the tone Black Farce rather than Black Comedy, the style of acting leaning more Three Stooges/John Belushi Samurai than Shavian debate re Capital Punishment and Japanese prejudice toward Koreans.  Shot in tight quarters, up-close & personal, Oshima stages this dead serious subject as crisscrossing slapstick, eventually bringing in a love interest for a bit of chaste bedtime action.  She says she’s his sister, but maybe she’s one of the victims, or perhaps a collective figment of imagination.  Then there’s the ‘closet case’ Chaplain who starts making passes when he gets drunk.  Ôshima’s circular anti-logic runs out of fuel halfway in, but the misterioso ending helps even if the film never rises to the level of hilarity and disquieting absurdity (like a one-tenth scale model version of the War Room sequence in Kubrick’s DR. STRANGELOVE/’64*) Ôshima must have been aiming for.

DOUBLE-BILL/LINK:  *Ôshima’s Kubrickian tendencies clearly seen in 1967's SING A SONG OF SEX/’67.    https://maksquibs.blogspot.com/2014/01/nihon-shunka-ko-sing-song-of-sex-1967.html