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Rating: "Escaping life by venturing into another dimension.
Purifying oneself for the second time.
Over there. In her secret garden, the virgin groans over the urban Eden.
The Adam of her dreams watches her in her pure chastity.
The girl who cries moans.
Her desire to live moans.
Su Su For the second time virgin".
Koji Wakamatsu remains one of the most ingenious directors of all time.
Always little mentioned, always little known, yet always with more tricks up his sleeve than many, many other directors can only dream of. This Japanese director succeeded in giving a soul to the pinku-eiga genre (Japanese erotic films), infusing them with the poetic catharsis that belongs to him alone. Thus, each of his works, almost always of short duration, hides a magnificent backdrop of political, poetic, violent facets. Wakamatsu's films reflect. They reflect on the ills of man and bring them to the highest level of perversion. At their peak.
It's a cinema that studies the collapse of any ideal. Nihilism on celluloid, explained in a way never so direct yet hidden.
In his immense filmography (about a hundred films), essential works emerge like "Angels with Dirty Wings" (a terrible and ruthless analysis of anti-patriotic sentiment that hides in sex and almost necrophilic perversion a reason to love one's country and at the same time die for it), "Violent Virgin", "Sex Jack", "Embryo", and so on. But there is one film I consider the fulcrum of his art.
And that is this "Su Su".
A film that enjoys (sur)realism and positions itself as criticism/praise of a vacuous and squalid youth, far from the ideals of the past. A jewel that laughs in the face of half the cinema with its ridiculous duration of 63 minutes.
A hallucinated and delirious love story between a girl raped by a group of punks on the roof of a huge building and a ruthless, cold, and shy killer, never so ingenious: shot with a decidedly happy, if not euphoric, hand. Wakamatsu makes himself known from the first shot and ends up creating an entirely disorienting work, where all the antipodes of cinema can be encountered in a new way. Hence, this jewel seems to be filmed by Antonioni and Meyer, dirty and clean, happy and incommunicable, sacred and profane.
Unforgettable direction, with fluid camera movements interspersed with cold long takes and photography alternating moments of calm black and white with the most explosive color, highlighting the most powerful scenes.
Find me a cinema like this. If you can. But don't be clever: don't try to talk about films released in 1969.
Wakamatsu created a genre: pulp before it was conceived in its modern form, surrealism mixed with porn.
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