Segura magura - shinitai onna (1970) The Woman Who Wanted to Die.avi

A piece of rock’n’roll has hardly sounded so powerful since in the last sequence of The Woman Who Wanted To Die by Koji Wakamatsu. Following a nimplacable psychological development, this last sequence illustrates marvellously the emancipation of a certain youth facing its elders, traditions and ancient values.
As often with Wakamatsu –a filmmaker known for his pink* films, acknowledged for having injected into it an anti-authority mind – the message is particularly ambiguous. The film presents the narrative of two couples, the one mature, the other one in full youth, who, meeting accidentally in a hot spring, are going to have to face their memories and frustrations, before they strive to heal their scars for good. While being inspired by the Japanese classic literature, the theme of the film has something original as far as it refers to a historical event that took place a little bit before the shooting: the attempt of a coup d’état orchestrated by writer Yukio Mishima, preceding his suicide. Unreleased up to now in Japan, insofar as archive images of those events are specifically shown, the film, without taking clearly a stand against the nationalist vision of Mishima, subtly criticizes the symbols inherited from the militaristic values of feudal Japan, which are at the heart of those ones. Filmed like a dream, highly stylized, sometimes similar to experimental cinema in the line of Eros+Massacre by Kiju Yoshida, The Woman Who Wanted To Sie draws on the Japanese tradition to be able to show better all its modernity.