Double Suicide aka Ten no Amijima - 1969
OK, this one was good. But people on this board probably shouldn't watch it because it promotes suicidality pretty intensely. A very avant-garde, semi-unreal film.
Opens with a modern director on the phone, staging a filming of a 1700s Chikamatsu Monzaemon puppet play. After a minute or two, the movie fades into real actors playing the puppets. The film is based on this play, which i'm not familiar with. A sort of "romeo and juliet" deal about a married man who falls in desperate love like a degenerate gambler with a courtesan, locked by debt in a pleasure house. She is a very sweet girl and loves him back, but others conspire to besmirch her motivations.
The cinematography is really brilliantly pretty, and the sets are sort of impressionistic -- for instance, the house the protag lives in is rendered in all-white, with kanji written all over the floor and walls, and the walls sometimes rotate out to be soaked with blood. There are strange theatrical features, like stagehands dressed in all black running around the set who occasionally "freeze time" (every actor stands dead still) and narrate, or silently help actors achieve tasks, or hand them a knife. Very artsy movie, reminds me of French film.
In the end, it's about deranged lunatics, and the leading man who "lives for love" sure does not treat his wife and children very well. There is a very epically shot and soundtracked double suicide (not rly a spoiler, it's foreshadowed in the 1st shot). One of the last shots of the film is the protagonist hanging himself with psychedelic jappy hand drum music. It would be a good movie to watch to fuel a macabre obsession, but in the end, the total unrelatability and unlovability of the male character, who destroys the lives of two beautiful women, means i pan this one even as I endorse it. DEPRESSING and DISTRESSING, who wants to watch a film to suffer, but yet I would lie if I said it weren't very evocative.
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